Abir Am Pnina 1992 - A Historical Ethnography of A Scientific Anniversary

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Social Epistemology
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A historical ethnography of a
scientific anniversary in molecular
biology: The first protein Xray
photograph (1984, 1934)
Pnina AbirAm
Department of History of Science, Medicine and

Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD,
212182690, USA
Available online: 19 Jun 2008
To cite this article: Pnina AbirAm (1992): A historical ethnography of a scientific anniversary
in molecular biology: The first protein Xray photograph (1984, 1934), Social Epistemology,
6:4, 323-354
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SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY, 1 9 9 2 , VOL. 6, NO. 4 , 3 2 3 - 3 5 4
A historical ethnography of a scientific

anniversary in molecular biology: the first
protein X-ray photograph (1984, 1934)1
Downloaded by [INASP - Pakistan ] at 17:29 28 July 2011
PNINA ABIR-AM
1. Introduction. Where history and ethnography meet: The scientific anniversary as

the epistemological object of historical ethnography
Scientific anniversaries of great scientists, scientific discoveries, or other scientific

institutions, have always been venerable ritualistic occasions for reaffirming,
inculcating, and modulating both the present epistemological aspirations and past
accomplishments of the celebrating scientific community. The eulogies delivered by the
perpetual secretaries of the Acadmie des Sciences are among the better known
instances of formal, routinized attempts at the construction of a collective memory and
moral genealogy of science, by spokesmen whose real or apparent authority was
grounded in their capacity to simultaneously and smoothly re-enact personal
incarnations of scientific progress and historical authenticity.2
However, despite their key epistemological and social roles, scientific anniversaries
have not been studied as performative occasions, or as the object of a historical
ethnography that explores not only the contents of the scientists' construction of a
collective memory for their discipline but also how it is performatively accomplished.
This gap in our knowledge of how scientific anniversaries work, that is, how they
manage to reconcile the contradiction between the relativism implied by discarded
convictions with the pretense of present scientific progress to an absolutist truth, can be
traced to an unfortunate separation between historians and ethnographers of science.
On the one hand, historians of science are accustomed to examine texts, including
commemorative texts, rather than address their critical gaze at scientific celebrations as
integratively bounded social performances. Thus, they noticed that though celebratory
Author: Pnina Geraldine Abir-Am, Department of History of Science, Medicine and Technology, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore MD 21218-2690, USA. I am grateful for comments by many of the scientist
ethnographees, as well as by ethnographers of science Francoise Bastide, Bruno Latour, Michael Lynch, and
Sharon Traweek; anthropologists Monni Adams, Mike Fischer, Barbara Frankel, and Nur Yalman; and historians
of science Mario Biagioli, John T. Edsall, and Joy Harvey. Other colleagues, especially the anonymous referees,
offered various helpful suggestions. All remaining errors are entirely my own. The participant observation was
made possible by a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and a Visitor status at Robinson College, Cambridge, UK,
during the year June 1983-June 1984. The ethnography was written during my stay as a post-doctoral fellow at
Harvard (1985-89) and as an international fellow at Northeastern University, Boston (1990-91). My gratitude
goes to my sponsors in these institutions and to NSF (grant DIR-8922152).
0269-1728/92 $3.00 1992 Taylor & Francis Ltd.
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PNINAABIR-AM
scientific texts provide crucial insights, even revelations, into the scientific and personal
past of the object of celebration, those texts also reflect systematic discrepancies
between the collective memory ratified by the celebrating community and the actual
past. However, historians of science did not explore how the celebratory occasion in
itself smoothes over such discrepancies, beyond implying that the scientist spokesmen's
appeals to the past were usually constrained by the assumption that 'the truth about the
collective actual past has a necessary or intrinsic relevance to ethical and political action
in the present'.3
On the other hand, ethnographers of science focused primarily on participant
observations of 'laboratory life', most notably on observing the process of production
of scientific facts (and artifacts) in the immediate present. Despite their membership in
an advanced industrial society that regards science as its mode of cognition, while
assuming a minimal level of scientific literacy for everyone, the ethnographers of
science sought to turn their relative lack of formal scientific education into an
ethnographic virtue. New insights into science could suddenly be generated not by
logical disquisition of its conceptual foundations, as philosophers of science have been
attempting ever since the logical positivist revolution; but by contending that the
laboratory, the site of presentist science in action, was a culturally alien environment
for the (non-scientifically trained) social scientist. Ironically, a pioneering ethnographer
of science dismissed the ethographic study of scientific anniversaries as '19th Century
anthropology'.4
In contrast to the above separatist stances of historians and ethnographers of science,
this paper explores how the performative action at a scientific anniversary can be
fruitfully studied from a joint, complementary historico-ethnographic perspective. The
paper further suggests a preliminary agenda for a historical ethnography of scientific
anniversaries across disciplines, historical periods, and countries. At the same time this
experiment with the genre of historical ethnography, as applied to a scientific
anniversary, further reflects on how the engagement with the research object had
partially transformed the author, while a visiting scholar in another country, from a
historian of science into an ethnographer of ceremonial scientific events, through a
process that constitutes a critique of disciplinary dogmas in history of science,
ethnography, and science.
Thus, the key problem addressed by this paper is how a scientific anniversary held
in 1984 had achieved performative efficacity in transforming a fifty years old nonevent or the preliminary inscription embodied in the first protein X-ray photograph
and its brief announcement in Nature, in 1934, into the birthmark or the origin of the
highly fashionable, prestigious, even revolutionary 'ultradiscipline' of molecular
biology.
First, the paper identifies some literature on scholarly ceremonials in general and
scientific ones in particular, as an ad hoc relevant context for the scientific anniversary
explored below. Second, the paper provides a self-ethnography for its author, so to
clarify the background enabling and constraining the process of transformation
entailed by the author's preoccupation with this historical ethnography.5 Third, the
paper describes a summary of the author's participant observation at the scientific
anniversary held in April 1984 in Cambridge, UK. Fourth, the paper offers an
interpretation of the scientific anniversary as a social drama, attempting the fusing of
authoritative concepts of historical authenticity with those of scientific progress, in an
effort to reconcile the relativism implied by discarded past science with the absolutism
of scientific progress in the present.
A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY
325
Finally, the paper inquires how extrapolating beyond the specificity of this historical
ethnography of the fiftieth anniversary of the first protein X-ray photograph may
produce an agenda for the study of the generic phenomenon of scientific anniversaries
across disciplines, historical periods, and countries, by the joint, complementary efforts
of historians of science, ethnographers, and scientists.
Ceremonial discourse in science has been analyzed by Mulkay who focused on the
Nobel Lectures in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He sought to demonstrate the
similarity between the constructivist features of the scientists' discourses and those of
ordinary persons, including sociologists. At the same time, Mulkay's discourse analysis
reveals how scientists construct scientific progress as both a personal accomplishment
of Nobelists and as a collective accomplishment of their background discipline(s) and
overshadowed collaborators. Furthermore, by examining the discursive rhetoric of the
various categories of speakers in the Nobel Prize ceremony (for example Laureates and
non-Laureates), Mulkay reveals many tacit conventions prevailing among scientists with
regard to impersonalizing and appropriating scientific credit.6 Such conventions are
also manifest during the scientific anniversary described below.
In contrast to Mulkay's focus on the generic features of ceremonial discourse in
science, Charlesworth and colleagues Farrall, Stokes, and Turnbull, examined the
actual inaugural speech of the Director of an internationally renowned immunological
research institute in Melbourne, Australia, delivered in November 1985, as an attempt
to create an institutional myth. While their attention had focused on the discrepancies
between the inaugural speech's lofty contents and the daily social reality in the institute,
Charlesworth and colleagues also recognized that history is one avenue for
understanding the institute's position in the present. Hence, they insightfully
contrasted the interest in history of the institute's worshipped ancestor, Sir MacFarlane
Burnet, a 1960 Nobel Prize winner for research in immunology, who served as Director
of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne for two decades ending in 1965,
with the lack of interest in history on the part of member scientists in the present.
However, Charlesworth and colleagues focused only briefly on the inauguration as a
performative occasion for constructing a specific historical record for the institute.7
A broader perspective on scholarly or cerebral ceremonies was offered by La
Fontaine in her normative analysis of public scholarly lectures, for example, inaugural
lectures, presidential addresses, and memorial lectures, as ceremonials. While
bemoaning the lack of ethnographic studies of British society, despite its saturation with
custom and tradition, La Fontaine has dwelled on the many various conventions
sustaining these ceremonial public lectures.
Included in the social conventions that La Fontaine decodes as being implicit in
scholarly ceremonials were their continuing a particular tradition, being a show case for
the ideas of an individual (rather than for the mission of an institution), occurring at
regular intervals, being sponsored by a professional organization, carrying no monetary
reward, inducing attendance as a matter of moral obligation or display of social
solidarity rather than for reasons of mere intellectual interest, balancing specialism with
generalism, reflecting the community's commitment to merit, among many other
conventions. She interprets the ceremonial lecture as a formal representation of the
principle that academic 'authority should reside with the more rather than the less
learned'.8
While La Fontaine did not specifically focus on how the holding of public scholarly,
whether inaugural, presidential, or memorial, lectures fulfills the custom of establishing
some historically valid link with the object of commemoration, Bogen and Lynch
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PNINAABIR-AM
explored the processes involved in the production of conventional history during the
performative interaction of witnesses and interrogators at the Iran-Contra
Congressional hearings in 1987. Their account describes 'some of the discursive
methods the interrogator uses to assimilate the witness's [the hostile native Oliver
North] stories to a conventional historical account and then goes on to discuss how the
witness is able to resist the movement from biography to history by embedding his
stories within a set of local entitlements that resist translation into a generalized
narrative'.9 Bogen and Lynch's study provides an instructive contrast to the production
of history in a scientific anniversary, where, as we shall see below, the movement from
biography to history is not resisted but rather encouraged through impressive
constructions of historical authenticity.
The analyses of La Fontaine and of Bogen and Lynch do not make specific mention
of scientific lectures or meetings; however, Lomnitz has elaborated on the analogy
between scientific meetings, of which scientific anniversaries are a specified subset, and
tribal fairs in small scale, traditional or primitive societies. She suggested that both are
public occasions for formal and informal ritualized exchanges or transactions of
valuables. In the case of scientific meetings, the transactions focus on scientific and
other relevant information, especially professional gossip. Furthermore, rank,
affiliation, topicality, or regions, though suspended throughout the breaks between
sessions, are reaffirmed through the formal structure of the program, which classifies
participants into a hierarchy of formal statuses, for example, speakers, chairmen,
commentators, organizers. Those statuses are further marked by timing, sequence, or
space allocations.10
Scientific anniversaries, however, possess unique additional features as they revolve
around a fixed, 'necessary', asymmetry in time between the performers and most of
their audience. The performers do not only represent successes in making scientific
progress but must also be able to evoke the past while recalling ancestor figures and
landmark events. This duality, of being able to 'embody' both the 'ancestral realm' (as a
source of professional life for the tribal assembly) and the 'ongoing present' (of
continuous concerns over the frontier of scientific progress), distinguishes the
performers at scientific anniversaries from those at ordinary meetings. The public
sharing of their recollections constitute the performers at scientific anniversaries as
participants in a subtle transaction of past memories for present loyalties.
Thus, a scientific anniversary cannot be easily analyzed in terms of contrasting
theories of social dramas advanced by anthropologists. On the one hand, the ritual
theory associated with the work of Victor Turner offers a relevant conception of social
drama as a regenerative process, while dwelling upon the theatrical and religious
dimensions of public performances. Along these lines, the scientific anniversary
described below can be understood as a 'regenerative' or even 'generative' process as it
aimed to construct, legitimize, and invest with authority a past event or a fifty years old
inscription qua 'discovery'the first protein X-ray photographas the totemic
birthmark of a sub-disciplinary clan undergoing reaffirmation of its collective identity.
The ritual theory thus draws attention to the scientific anniversary as an opportunity for
collectively experiencing disciplinary solidarity and reasserting scientific identity by the
celebrating group.11
On the other hand, the symbolic action theory associated with the work of Clifford
Geertz is also relevant for an understanding of scientific anniversaries, since during
such anniversaries, a variety of symbols, especially the first or primordial protein X-ray
photograph and the most recent, or 'fresh as yesterday' computer graphics aided
327
design, are converted, as we shall see below, into profound, collective meanings of
disciplinary origins and scientific progress, respectively. Geertz's symbolic action theory
emphasizes the theatrical and rhetorical dimensions of public performances, or in his
own words 'persuasion over communion', 'ideology over liturgy', and 'the platform
over the temple' as the stage of performance.12
The question persists, however, as to how such diverse approaches, alternately
emphasizing the social or the conceptual aspects of a ceremony, can be integrated in
the interpretation of a scientific anniversary. Tambiah's masterful analysis of the merits
and limitations of both the 'social' and 'cultural' approaches to ritual,13 offers a most
promising approach for a potential synthesis of the conceptual and social aspects of a
scientific anniversary, especially since his analysis resonates with the major but still
elusive goal of historians of science to integrate the conceptual and social dimensions of
science in their historical context.14
2. From paraethnographic history of science to historical ethnography of a scientific

anniversary: The self-ethnography of a visiting scholar
Scientific anniversaries came to my attention as valuable units of historical, and later

ethnographic, analysis, as a result of my exposure to numerous, both individual and
collective, efforts by scientists to provide authoritative versions of the origins of their
disciplines.15 In particular, while researching the history of molecular biology, for both
my M.Sc. and Ph.D. theses,16 I became especially fascinated by the prevalence of so
many conflicting accounts, as well as by the raging 'historiographie battles' among
leading, usually Nobel scientists, in the emerging literature on the history of this
ultradiscipline.17 Initially, my efforts focused on historical and rhetorical analysis of
published texts by scientist spokesmen, acknowledged founders, conscientious
objectors and by-stander leaders from neighbouring disciplines to the spectacular rise
of this discipline in the 1960s.'8
However, my arrival in Cambridge, England, as a Wellcome research fellow for the
year starting in June 1983 rapidly convinced me that I had landed in an ideal scientificoethnographic setting. My formal purpose was to conduct further archival research in
the Cambridge University Library's Manuscript Room, with a view to adapting my
Ph.D. thesis to produce a book on the origins of molecular biology in the 1930s.
However, I soon noticed that many 'survivors' from the 1930s were still around, and
many remembered well the, mostly deceased, protagonists of the story I was
researching.19 Moreover, their daily trajectory often intersected with my own, as they
were also spending their days in the University Library, at various Collgial socioacademic functions, and in a residence within walking distance of these two institutions.
Thus, I gradually began to approach this generation of scientists and significant
others for oral history sessions, in between my ongoing preoccupation with the archival
record in the Manuscript Room of Cambridge University Library. With few exceptions,
most of these veteran scholars proved to be helpful and cooperative. Possibly they
perceived me to be the pursuer of the noble goal of excavating truth on the muddled
past of science, a potential conduit to posterity, a source of archival vignettes, a
cosmopolitan traveller, a visiting scholar qua temporary guest, or all of the above.
Another reason for our facile rapport may have been the fact that the 1930s survivor
scientists (who would have belonged, during my historico-ethnographic adventures in
the early 1980s, to the age group and status of distinguished elders, or informal
328
PNINAABIR-AM
statesmen of science), themselves often had some interest in the history of science.
Their interest was usually derivative of their parahistorical duties, most notably the
writing of formal obituaries of prematurely or otherwise recently deceased colleagues
for scientific societies such as the Royal Society or the National Academy of Science.
As a result of their exposure to such officially sanctioned forays into the history of
science, we had a mutual basis for a productive dialogue: while most of the scientists
responded to my questions on various scientific, social, or personality puzzles from the
1930s, I would tell them spicy stories from the archival record that I had been
examining for the last five years on both sides of the ocean. Essentially, we traded in
memories: they offered authentic ones, their own, while I reciprocated by sharing with
them my second-order memories of archival gems, for example, revealing
correspondence exchanges between great figures from the past, which stirred our
human curiosity or name-dropping propensity, beyond their specific value as historical
markers.
At the same time, our oral history sessions increasingly acquired ethnographic
overtones as the need for cultural and temporal translation would surface every so
often. Although we shared key intellectual presuppositions, such as an interest in the
universalistic role of science and its history in Western civilization, formative training as
scientists, and a penchant for Collgial life in Cambridge, we also had our own unique
cultural and historical backgrounds. While the elder British scientist-interviewees had
various disciplinary, Collgial, regional, ethnic, class, gender sensibilities which I slowly
learned to appreciate, I was also carrying diverse explicit and implicit cultural baggage,
such as educational and research experience in several countries, languages, academic
institutions, and disciplines.
Yet another source of the ongoing need for 'translation' derived from the fact that
my scientist ethnographees were embedded in the Cambridge Collgial sub-culture, a
bastion of academic ritual, which still retained in the early 1980s many of its customs
from the 1930s or much earlier. They delighted in translating many terms required to
convey to me the intricacies of Fellowship in various Colleges, or in displaying their
knowledge of Collgial histories, academic or scientific dynasties, Town and Gown
customs. We lived in a mutual dialectics of academic particularism, scientific
universalism, and historical relativism, modulated by various Collgial rites that
increasingly impressed upon me the mutual fit between my fortunate location on the
fringes of the Cambridge Collgial setting and my dreams for exploring inter-war
British science in an historico-ethnographic manner.20
Furthermore, my incipient plans for exploring inter-war Cambridge science in a
historico-ethnographic manner gained further feasibility from the local lore according
to which no one less than Claude Levi-Strauss, the hero of structural anthropology, had
suggested that Sir James Frazer, a founding father of anthropology, could have done
better (than writing The Golden Bough) if he had written an ethnography of a Cambridge
College, most notably of his own College, Trinity, perhaps the richest in both legend
and assets. Yet, if Frazer proved too much of a Cambridge 'native' for the task
envisaged for him by Levi-Strauss, my own background appeared to provide the right
blend of empathy and cultural distance required for a good start in mutual
ethnography.
In my case the traditional relationship of superiority in both knowledge and power
between the white male ethnographer and colored natives in colonized countries was
both inverted and balanced. Though my scientist ethnographees belonged, at least
during their lives in the 1930s, to the mindset of the scientifico-cultural elite of the
329
British Empire, which dominated the pre-World War II world order; during our
encounters in the early 1980s, the British Empire was a thing of the past. Indeed, three
of the four countries in which I had studied prior to my arrival in Britain, namely
Canada, USA, and Israel, had once been ruled by Britain but subsequently became
instrumental in the dismantling of British political superiority. I further hoped that my
European birthplace would rescue me from being occasionally viewed as an ex-colonial
entity. In any event, our ethnographer-ethnographee relationship was embedded in
our sharing an increasingly post-modernist predicament.
Gradually I concluded, in line with La Fontaine's above observation on the lack of
ethnography of British customs, especially academic ones, that by treating as its
research object two of the pillars of cultural superiority of Western civilization, namely
science and British culture, in addition to historicizing both for the 1930s, a historical
ethnography of inter-war Cambridge science could be innovative on two major counts.
This exuberant conclusion led me first to attempt an ethnographic reorientation of
my previous paraethnographic oral and archival research in history of science.21 If
previously I had been content to examine the texts of myths of origins in molecular
biology,22 under the impact of pervasive academic ritual in Cambridge and its majestic
scholarly confrontations, I increasingly became preoccupied with the difference
between a live and a textual confrontation between protagonists of opposite
historiographical accounts. That difference seemed to parallel the difference between
watching and reading about a bull fight. So, I began to dream about watching an actual
corrida of tribal scientific historiography, or the actual process during which scientists
construct a historical account for their discipline as a live performance. Suddenly, my
formerly beloved task of critiquing the presentist agendas forever evident in the
scientists' writings, in light of ever deeper archival excavations, appeared to have faded
in view of the spontaneity of action promised by a live historiographical performance.23
Having thus prepared my mind for the preceding year, one spring day in April 1984,
my dream of observing how scientists create history came true. While reflecting with a
mixture of anger and despair on my belated notification of a projected meeting of
scientists devoted to the anniversary of a discovery, which meant that it was too late to
arrange for oral history interviews with the distinguished participants, it dawned on me,
as I was crossing Clare College Bridge on my daily promenade, that I could bypass the
temporal impossibility of scheduling individual oral histories, if I were to shift the focus
of analysis from individual participants to the collective performance constituting the
scientific anniversary. Due to such fortuitous circumstances, I was finally able to
materialize my previous ethnographic dreams.
My new goal became to understand how the scientific anniversary, as a structured
and bounded event, was to create and impart to the participants a particular conception
of their collective disciplinary past. Of course, I knew that it would be hard for me not
to interfere whenever 'amateurish' historical pronouncements would contradict my
own, profuse and largely archive-derived sensibility, but I decided that I should strive to
confine my presence to that of an ethnographer in the classical realist tradition. I took
that to mean a highly disciplined and accurate recording of the scientists' conduct
throughout the duration of the anniversary. I also knew that I would have to oscillate
between two modes of knowing, the 'conceptual' or the accurate recording of the
contents of specific recollections by the scientist speakers (including those which might
be 'dismissable' on the basis of previous historiographie judgement); and the 'social' or
the patterns of social interaction among the various clan members, during the formal
and informal parts of the event.
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PNINA ABIR-AM
Having previously enjoyed reading some ethnographies but without ever acquiring a
professional interest in studying exotic societies, I felt acutely the lack of a 'know how'
manual that could tell me how was I supposed to comport myself in the familiar
auditorium turned challenging ethnographic 'field'. Thus, I was not quite sure how to
observe all the social interaction during the informal parts of the program when the
participants would disperse simultaneously in different directions and I would have to
quickly decide which group to follow. If only I could be lucky enough to quickly spot
the best informants during those moments of 'chaos', that is, question periods, coffee,
tea or lunch breaks, when my formerly 'fixed' audience would suddenly become mobile
and amorphous, then I would have 'captured' and 'preserved' the integrative totality of
a scientific commemoration.
This was what I thought in my excitement at having finally found an observational

object that would enable me to express my dual, complementary interest in history and
ethnography of science. Sadly, any dreams I might have had of getting a last moment
crash course in either ethnography or applied historical epistemology of science, let
alone moral support for venturing into their uncharted borderline, evaporated when I
recalled my global and local groups of reference in history/philosophy of science,
anthropology, and science.
My projected endeavor fell in between the preoccupations of several, largely isolated,
scholarly communities, on the fringes of which I had enjoyed a marginal existence for
the preceding decade or so, while conducting an 'unending quest' for a subversive
dissertation. My primary or formal group of reference, the historians of science, were
not exactly in the business of integrative gazing, reflexively or otherwise, at scientists
fashioning their tribal histories in the immediate present.
First, the history of twentieth century science was then still at the bottom of the
history of science pecking order, where the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth
century defined a chronologically reversed pecking order. Second, the
paraethnographic technique of oral history, though accepted among the then few
historians of twentieth century science, was viewed as a secondary, somewhat
unreliable, source of data. The archival record was considered to be the 'master
context' of historical interpretation, even though this led some practitioners to confuse
the writing of history with a mere reiteration of the archival contents, often prefaced by
a ritualistic appeal to the ever elusive social context.
However, in the 1970s, historians of science had begun to oscillate between
Story of the intellectual and social history of science, while liberating themselves slowly but surely
British from a previous hegemonic philosophy of science and its ahistorical ideals of rational
reconstruction. In that context of liberating science from its golden bondage as the
(Cambridge)
embodiment of reason in Western civilization, some historians and historically-minded
field of
philosophers of science had seized upon anthropology as a leading source of cultural
history of
relativism. Their first contribution, as I recall, was to import some shocking metaphors,
science most notably the revelation that science, stripped of its rationalistic pretensions, was
just another 'belief system', on the same par with magic, religion, art, and related
coherent systems.24
The chief anthropological gurus of historians and philosophers of science were
Mary Douglas, whose work, especially the grid-group model, provided a model
for integrating the conceptual and social aspects of science;25 and Clifford Geertz,
whose symbolic action analysis of various 'cultural systems' (for example, ideology,
religion, art) pointed toward a similar, interpretive analysis of science.26 Nevertheless, the many liberating insights and exotic terminology provided by
331
anthropologists for historians and philosophers of science, did not seem to lead to
concrete research programs in ethnographic history, let alone historical or
philosophical ethnography of science, despite some such developments in general
history, until the mid-1980s.27
However, the news of this general rapprochement between history of science and
anthropology did not seem to have reached the relevant departments at Cambridge
University, despite their physical proximity as next door neighbours, on Free School
Lane, in a building occupied in the 1930s by the famous Cavendish Laboratory of
Physics (since relocated to the outskirts of Cambridge). Though both departments
graciously gave me permission to attend their respective weekly colloquia, as venerable
Cambridge entities they often saw their raison d'tre in following their own illustrious
but insulary disciplinary traditions. I was inevitably disappointed by the complete lack
of any intellectual or organizational contact between them.
This immutable situation shook my precarious confidence in the feasibility of my
quest for an historical ethnography of science, as it implied its prematurity or even its
implausibility. For example, a member of the Department of Anthropology who was
otherwise friendly, but apparently wary about other disciplines' supposed abuse of the
ethnographic method told me flatly that I would never be an anthropologist unless I did
an ethnography of a funeral in Ghana, a statement that froze me, even though ! never
pretended or intended to become a 'classical' anthropologist.
A similar lack of professional context for my project of historical ethnography of
Cambridge science in the 1930s obtained in the D epartment of H istory and Philosophy
of Science at Cambridge University, possibly due to a split of complex origins between
the historians and the philosophers of science, or due to the fact that Simon Schaffer
had not yet arrived from Lon don . 28
One Cambridge scholar who displayed some interest toward my endeavor was C.
H umphrey, a Fellow of King's College, whose by then deceased illustrious scientist
father was one of the group of radical scientists in the 1930s that I had studied for my
Ph.D . thesis. When H umphrey pronounced that one chapter in my Ph.D . thesis in
history of science qualified as social anthropology, I was so moved that upon walking
away from our lunch at King's majestic H all, I almost stepped on lawns forbidden to
non Fellows. 29 Eventually my alternating, enthusiastic and skeptical moods concerning
the feasibility of a historical ethnography of science, were put to test in mid April 1984
when my 'one day in the life of a self styled historical ethnographer of science' had
finally arrived.
3. Process and structure in a scientific anniversary: The fiftieth anniversary of the

first protein X ray photograph (1984, 1934)
Shortly before 11 a.m. on Friday, 13 April 1984, I blended into the movement of
individuals and groups progressing toward the anniversary site, through the porter's
gate of the New Museum Site, and climbing on the antique metal stairway leading to the
first floor of the Computer Science Building where the Cockroft Theatre is located to
the left of the stairway. About eighty people appeared to have segregated themselves in
the sitting space by age groups. The first two rows were occupied by veterans of the
1930s, detectable by their white hair and an audible concern with hearing well.
D ispersed on the side seats of the Theatre, as if still enjoying last moments of imaginary
anonymity sat the projected speakers. The central section was populated by rank and
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file post-doctoral fellows, the target audience of the anniversary as they embody the
future of the scientific clan or its medium of social reproduction.
The audience members spent the moments prior to opening vividly identifying each
other. It was evident from this commotion, which my native English speaking
companion and I did our best to overhear, that the participants came for two different
reasons: the veterans came to relive and possibly refine or redefine the past, while the
younger generation saw an opportunity to update themselves on professional gossip
and listen to their elders, the Nobelist keynote speakers. With some exceptions, each
age group tended to stay together. A program distributed at the door described the
one-day meeting as a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first protein X-ray
photograph, taken, indexed and interpreted in 1934 by John Desmond Bemal, FRS
(1901-1971) and Dorothy Crowfoot (later Hodgkin, 1910-, FRS, OM).30
The meeting was eventually opened by Alan McKay, a veteran member of the
Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck College, London.31 This department was
established in 1963 for Bemal, who had come from Cambridge University in 1938 to
head the Physics Department. McKay, who had been collaborating, since the early
1980s, on a project on the history of X-ray crystallography, did not waste time before he
stated that we, the audience, were privileged to meet with those on whose shoulders the
revolution in molecular biology stood. He further referred to the explicit object of the
half-centennial anniversarythe first X-ray photograph of an active protein, taken in
1934as the beginning of molecular biology.
McKay did not elaborate on the significance or rationale for this relatively belated
assertion, or rather admission, by a spokesman for the clan of protein X-ray
crystallographers, that their historical rights as founders of molecular biology, were no
longer so self-evident, as they long believed them to be. Rather, those rights, however
accurate, needed special collective reaffirmation both for the benefit of the clan's new
generation, but especially in view of the fact that other clans, such as the phage
geneticists in the US or the microbial physiologists in France, had already successfully
appropriated the founder rights, simply by developing, or rather displaying, their
collective historical consciousness ten or fifteen years earlier.32
The British protein X-ray crystallographers' belated development or display of their
historical consciousness was not linked by McKay to their ancestor's loose style of
leadership, to his institutional precariousness or base outside the ancient universities,
or to his extensive and possibly excessive preoccupations with radical politics and avantgarde sex, a combination that may have lessened his impact as head of a research
school.
Instead, McKay further described Bernai as a conceptual and professional seer, or a
visionary, having both anticipated topics and problems (that is, solving the structure of
complex biological compounds such as proteins, hormones, and viruses by X-ray
diffraction as the key requirement for understanding their biological functions), which
were still being solved a generation later, and recruited or inspired many would-be
distinguished X-ray crystallographers. McKay's enumeration of Bernal's recruits was
significant in that he included both those associated with technical improvements,
especially early computer building, and those who used that equipment to solve
biologically significant structures. McKay reminded the audience of a less glamorous
aspect of protein X-ray crystallography, instrumentation, at a time when professional
glory remained associated with fully solved biological structures.
Finally, McKay turned to the task, 'difficult' as he put it, of introducing the first
speaker, Aaron Klug, Director of the Virus Structure Unit at the MRC Laboratory of
333
Molecular Biology in Cambridge. The difficulty McKay referred to may have stemmed
from the public juxtaposition of a total reversal of these two colleagues' former
positions, with Klug, once a foreign arrival and worker on a hopeless task emerging as
the object of international glory, while McKay, the once more veteran colleague
receding into the background of the scientific frontier, as a champion of its past.
Klug, then a recent (1982) recipient of the Nobel Prize, walked to the podium with
humility and modesty, as if he had not yet become accustomed to being the center of
scientific celebrations. A medium-sized man with slightly greyish hair and a look
radiating both kindness and a most pleasant lack of pretentiousness, in his late fifties,
Klug first defused the tension derivative of the curiosity and expectations focused on a
fresh Nobelist by apologizing that he was cast undeservingly as the first speaker, even
though he was the last among the speakers to have encountered Bernai, because he 'had
to catch a train'. The resulting laughter showered sympathy on him while reassuring
everyone that contingency still has a place among high-ranking scientists.
Klug's fairly organized repertoire revolved around thirty or so slides that he
accompanied by vivid anecdotes and recollections. The slides presented both historical
objects such as old laboratory buildings, instruments or people; and scientific ones,
especially graphical displays of scientific results, properly arranged in a progressive
order. Klug's presentation alternated between personal recollections of Bernai, and
stages of scientific progress in Klug's own work on TMV structure. Klug's frank and
insightful remark that Bemal was temperamentally unsuited to pursue and complete
work requiring a lot of details immediately established Klug as an authentic and reliable
witness of the past, since almost all other speakers refrained from evaluating Bernai,
who as the founder of protein X-ray crystallography was their 'ancestor', in ways that
could be interpreted as being critical.33
Some interesting attempts to deflate Klug's neat historical recollections and scientific
stages of progress were made during the 'Questions & Answers' period, especially by
scientist veterans of the 1930s who were not included on the Program, most notably
Henry Lipson, F.R.S. and Norman Pirie, F.R.S. While Lipson, an X-ray
crystallographer chiefly known for his technical innovations, relished to remind the
audience of scientific errors grounded in imperfect command of techniques, Pirie, a
former Cambridge biochemist and comrade of Bernai in leftist politics in the 1930s,
insisted that Bernal's image as profoundly involved with politics and sex be properly
acknowledged.
Those reminders were humorously handled by Klug and eventually submerged in
computer-graphics multi-colored images of progress as 'fresh as yesterday', delivered
by one of Klug's most accomplished former post-doctoral fellows, the American
Stephen Harrisson of Harvard, who was apparently charged with presenting the most
recent incarnation of scientific progress in virus structure because of Klug's imminent
departure for the train.34
During the lunch break I joined McKay and a few other participants for the short
stroll from Downing Street to Emmanuel College. McKay explained to us that the
College elected Bernai to Fellowship post-humously, eager to bask in the glory of a
former outcast. While queueing for the buffet lunch in Emmanuel's Library, the
younger scientists reverted to shop talk about their research projects, recent results,
and career plans. I joined a group of them, which included an Indian woman and an
Israeli man, for a discussion on the relationship between science and its history.
Eventually, we found ourselves near the duck pond, a Collgial institution that inspires
great pride in its members and a sense of misplaced domesticity in visitors.
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However, the main historical benefit from the lunch took place when McKay's
collaborator on the project in history of X-ray crystallography, Harmke Kamminga,
introduced me to Margot Heinemann, an English don from New Hall at Cambridge,
whom I primarily knew, from the secondary literature on the 1930s, as an author on the
relationships between art and leftist politics and as a friend of John Cornford, the poet
and leader of communist students who died as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War.35
Heinemann, whom I would meet later on a number of occasions in both Cambridge
and London during which she displayed original and perceptive views of Bemal (with
whom she had a daughter in the early 1950s but whom she did not know well in the
1930s), introduced me to her lunch companion, Anita Rimel, known to me from the
archive as one who managed Bernal's professional life with utmost devotion and
efficiency. Rimel produced an excellent string of historical 'nuggets', the most
important being that shortly before his death Bernai contemplated writing the story of
the avant-garde Theoretical Biology Club in the 1930s, the topic of my own Ph.D.
thesis. This revelation both surprised and delighted me, as my long-debated choice of
topic for my thesis turned out to reflect the perception of one of my key historical
actors turned scientist ancestor.36
Similar strategies of alternating slides of historical and scientific objects were
deployed by the afternoon speakers, Bernal's Nobelist students Dorothy Crowfoot
Hodgkin and Max Perutz. D. C. Hodgkin, who as the surviving co-author of the
celebrated paper and first student to complete a Ph.D. with Bernai, had a special
position in the anniversary, put on a spectacular performance, as befitting her unique
position in science as perhaps the only woman head of an internationally renowned
research school. Among her various, historically relevant, revelations was her absence
from the laboratory, due to illness, on the day Bernai actually took the celebrated first
protein X-ray photograph. She further displayed an impressive concern with historical
authenticity while providing detailed descriptions of Bernal's laboratory, collaborators,
illustrious visitors, and prevailing jovial spirit in the 1930s.37
In addition, D. C. Hodgkin called to the podium a living witness, the Oxford
biochemist John Philpot (1911), whose unique pepsin crystals enabled Bernai to take
the first protein X-ray photograph having been brought to him in their mother liquor.38
Dry crystals showed no patterns since the water was part of the crystal structure.
Another living witness, Tom Blundell, who as Head of the Department of
Crystallography at Birkbeck College was the current occupant of Bernal's office, was
shortly after called to give a scientific update on the then still ongoing efforts,
worldwide, to solve the structure of pepsin.39
Though the pepsin story had been previously told in writing by D. C. Hodgkin,40 the
live performance of unexpected witnesses was even more conducive to conveying
historical authenticity. So were the slides of two, previously unknown, of Bernal's
handwritten notes on pepsin, which she had recently found while sorting her own
papers, and in which Bernai tried to interpret those preliminary X-ray patterns in
specific structural terms. The rest of the talk charted D. C. Hodgkin's progress on 'her
own protein', insulin, on which she had started to work in 1935, abandoned in 1939,
and returned to in the early 1960s.41
Many questions following D. C. Hodgkin's talk focused on Philpot's experience in
Uppsala. Much to the audience's surprise, the then 73-years-old Philpot confessed that
he went to Uppsala, on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, not in the pursuit of the
ultracentrifuge, as Perutz sought to confirm in his question, but rather in a romantic
pursuit of Swedish protein physical chemist Inga-Brita Eriksson. Although the Swedish
335
interlude produced beautiful crystals for Bernai (which formed during Philpot's
absence due to a ski vacation), Philpot returned to England by himself, once Inga-Brita
married a Swedish colleague and remained in Uppsala as Mrs Eriksson-Quensel.42
I spent the tea break between the afternoon talks mostly talking to the newly
uncovered living witness John Philpot, who recalled a lot of relevant material from
Oxford in the 1930s. I was glad to be able to arrange to meet with him and his scientist
wife, Flora, later in Oxford for a more extended oral history, a meeting that eventually
materialized in June 1984.
The last speaker, Max Perutz, a veteran of historically loaded inquiries and
controversies with regard to both proteins and DNA, apparently did not need to
perform the customary rite of persuasion via slides. He prepared instead a rich
repertory of anecdotes, revelations, and confessions as befits his long experience as a
spokesman for science in its cultural context, as well as a spokesman for the history of
molecular biology. Perutz's bold, revealing anecdotes signalled the desire of scientist
spokesmen for greater historical authenticity. Thus, he made references to dilapidated
laboratories in the 1930s, which were to be remedied by a vague philanthropic scheme
involving the Director of the Cavendish Physics Laboratory at Cambridge, Lord
Rutherford, the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the car maker millionaire
Austin.43
Perutz's extensive delving into historically relevant professional gossip, which greatly
delighted the audience, included not only Bernai whose legacy Perutz described as
more theoretical than empirical, but also many other key figures in the history of
molecular biology, especially those who like W. T. Astbury, L. Pauling, and I.
Fankuchen affected Perutz's own research. He also responded to a special request to
clarify the near expulsion of Francis Crick, of the double helix fame, from the
Cavendish Laboratory, by its then Director Sir W. Lawrence Bragg. Like Klug
beforehand, Perutz supported his emphasis on Bernal's 'visionary insights' with
quotations from Bernal's writings in the late 1930s and the 1940s and from BBC
discussions between Bernai and Sir William H. Bragg, the founder of X-ray
crystallography.44
However, upon presenting his scientific work on haemoglobin structure, Perutz
adopted an essentially progressive path. Yet, in line with his and other speakers' explicit
quest for greater historical authenticity, Perutz confessed to errors in the early 1950s,
and of the horror of being left behind in 'flatland' (that is, without the capacity to
produce a three-dimensional model) in the late 1950s, prior to surveying the triumphs
of the 1960 and 1970s when he solved the structure of haemoglobin and proposed a
widely accepted mechanism for explaining its function as a 'molecular lung'.45
The questions following Perutz's talk were mostly provocative, while reminding
Perutz of the more famous incidents around him such as the rows between Crick and
Bragg, of his own confrontation with another early Bernai associate, the American 'Fan'
who voiced objections to Perutz's work, or of his 'luck' in having Linus Pauling, a fierce
American competitor of Bemal and his associates on the problem of protein structure,
abandon the haemoglobin problem in the 1930s.46
Following the formal ending of the meeting at 5.30 p.m., I joined a group of
participants for drinks in the nearby pub, The Eagle, which achieved notoriety as the
place in which the double helix was first announced. In the pub I had to decide whether
to sit with a group around D. C. Hodgkin, whose facile sociability with younger
colleagues in the pub struck me as an unexpected clue to her unusual position as leader
of a large research school of biomolecular crystallography; or whether to continue my
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discussion with the chairman of the last session, Herman Watson, which started on the
way from the Auditorium to the pub.47
I opted for continuing my discussion with Dr H. Watson (who would repeatedly insist
that his first initial be used so to distinguish himself from the more notorious 'other
Watson' of the double helix scandals), eventually compensating for the sense of loss
involved in my dilemma of having to choose between two crucial ethnographees, when
two months later I was able to meet D. C. Hodgkin in Oxford. H. Watson provided
numerous insights into many puzzles from the history of protein X-ray crystallography,
including the absence of Sir John Kendrew, the versatile scientist who solved the
structure of the first protein (myoglobin) in the late 1950s, before becoming a science
statesman, the first director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and the
earliest author on the role of protein X-ray crystallography in the rise of molecular
biology.48
My long and transformative day, at the end of which I felt vindicated in my adventure
in historical ethnography, ended befittingly on the same Clare College bridge, where I
stood undecided for a few minutes, while contemplating the pros and cons for
attending the concluding dinner for the Meeting's participants at Emmanuel College.
On the one hand, I had to estimate the probability of further historically relevant
'nuggets' surfacing during the dinner. On the other hand, I felt that the performers
deserved to relax among themselves without the inevitably intrusive presence of a
historian turned ethnographer who might forget, especially under the influence of
unlimited Collgial port, not to offer misplaced correctives to their memory.
Eventually, my desire to type my 'field' notes right away, with my memory still fresh,
especially with the lore I had just heard in the pub, and which I could not write down,
further convinced me to transcribe my nearly illegible notes on the typewriter right
away. Thus, I ended my experimental day in the reassuring setting of my College office.
As a result of various constraints, especially my departure from the Cambridge
historico-ethnographic paradise two months later, and my subsequent professional
adventures in Ischia, Cambridge, Mass., Montreal, and Tel Aviv, for the remainder of
1984,1 did not return to the writing of my experiment in historical ethnography until a
year later.
My initial writing, which deliberately reflected the objectivist, realist genre of classical
ethnographies, was completed shortly before the 17th International Congress for
History of Science, held in Berkeley early in August 1985, and submitted for
publication later in 1985. The hybrid character of my paper, which strove to capture
empirically the entire wealth of historical detail 'unearthed' by the scientific
anniversary, but also to provide an ethnographic framework for its interpretation as a
social drama, baffled the referees. While some objected to my implicit treatment of the
archival record as a 'master context', others compared me adversely to Geertz and
Turner, who were said to possess more empathy toward their 'natives' than I, the
historian of science, presumably displayed toward my scientist ethnographees.49
Many other similarly misguided comments, some interim professional experiences
that eroded my earlier passion for interdisciplinary Utopias, and my eventual discovery
of the new movement of experimentation with an expanded, flexible, and
interdisciplinary ethnographic genre, of whose 'poetics and politics' I finally became
aware, enabled me to split the initially comprehensive, or dual message of an
ethnographic history coupled to a historical ethnography of a scientific anniversary into
two distinct papers.50
Hence, this paper began with a self-ethnography, which suggested how my increasing
337
reflexivity as a novice historical ethnographer had enabled and constrained both the
above described, participant observation, of the scientific anniversary and the following
interpretation of the anniversary as a social drama revolving around a fusion of
authoritative conceptions of historical authenticity and scientific progress, a fusion
designed to smooth the contradiction between science's relativist past of discarded
convictions and its absolutist present of ultimate scientific progress.51
3.1. Constructing historical authenticity in a scientific anniversary
A few days after the meeting, I thought to assess the impact of the anniversary on the
audience by administering a brief questionnaire. My tentative forays into quantitative
sociology were brief since the co-organizer whom I approached for the list of
participants was not eager to co-operate. The question thus persists as to whether the
fiftieth anniversary of the first protein X-ray photograph was efficacious, as a social
ritual, in persuading the participants that a short, preliminary though visionary paper,
barely noticed in its time, or at any time between 1934 and 1984, should be regarded as
the birthmark of the prestigious, even revolutionary, discipline of molecular biology. If
so, the question further persists as to how the anniversary was able precisely to convey
such an original message, regarding the validity of the protein X-ray crystallographers'
related ancestral claim to be recognized as founders of molecular biology.
The scientific anniversary's immediate efficacy may be contrasted with my own, much
slower, efficacity in conveying the notion, based on five hundred pages of dissertation
research, that the origins of molecular biology in Britain were to be found in the life
story of the Biotheoretical Gathering, an avant-garde group of scientists active in the
1930s, but especially in an unpublished proposal for an interdisciplinary research
institute that its five founders submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1935. That
proposal anticipated many of the problems that later came to constitute molecular
biology, including X-ray crystallography of protein structure, gene structure, molecular
evolution. J. D. Bernai, who took the first protein X-ray photograph in 1934, was
among the five founding members of this group, which came into being in 1932.52
The scientific anniversary's efficacity in retrospectively transforming a fifty years old
'non-event' into a credible claim for founder status in molecular biology, stemmed from
an ongoing interplay, in each Nobelist keynote speaker's performance, between two
complementary registers of meaning. On the one hand, a key feature of the scientific
anniversary was the explicit effort by each keynote speaker to convey historical
authenticity by providing revealing accounts of the speaker's early days of association
with Bernai, while further backing each account with numerous visual displays of
authentic relics from the past, such as pictures of people, 'antique' buildings and
instruments, recently found handwritten letters from Bernai, quotations from his
scientific papers, historical writings, and public broadcastings, even anecdotes involving
famous name-dropping, while stretching from the 1930s to the 1950s, and including
leading scientists Rutherford, W. H. and W. L. Bragg, Crick, Prime Minister Stanley
Baldwin and millionaire Austin, among others. On the other hand, each keynote
speaker did not limit his or her discourse to constructing themselves and their past
situations as historically authentic; rather, each keynote speaker also conveyed a parallel
story of personal scientific progress. That progress was illustrated with slides displayed in
a sequence of increasing degrees of atomic resolution (that is, low, intermediary, and
high)the type of progress characteristic of the protein X-ray crystallographers' work
and scientific goals.
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Having demonstrated the historical authenticity of Bernai and his early associates'
priority in initiating X-ray crystallographic studies on the structure of key biological
compounds such as sex hormones, proteins, and viruses in the mid-1930s, the keynote
speakers superimposed their discourse on Bernai and on their own relationship to him,
onto a discourse of concrete stages of progress in solving fully, that is, at atomic scale,
the structure of those complex biological macromolecules.
Prior to exploring how these two intermingling discourses, one on historical
authenticity and another on scientific progress, created a special effect of smooth
continuity between the disciplinary clan's past and present, an effect which, I suggest,
constitutes the very essence of this scientific anniversary as a social ritual, it is necessary
to elaborate on the multi-dimensional symbolism embedded in the discourse on
historical authenticity.
Though the historical authenticity of the keynote speakers was visibly grounded in
their scientific biography and personae, by then a matter of public record for the group
since the keynote speakers, as Nobelists, have already provided an accessible, even
official, account of their work and life in their respective and widely accessible Nobel
Lectures, still they strove to display expertise in various, occasionally subtle, historical
matters. For example, I detected seven converging dimensions of historical authenticity
built into their performative action and discursive practices.
The first type of historical authenticity built into the scientific anniversary was
inscriptional, revolving around the public rite of resurrecting an old paper formerly
confined to oblivion by a surrounding scientific community of apparently indifferent
clans, and reinterpreting it as the birthmark of a new, prestigious discipline. Once the
clan of protein X-ray crystallographers had finally decided to make appeal to history, a
short, fifty-year-old paper from Nature, announcing the successful taking of the first
protein X-ray photograph was no longer viewed as one of many other preliminary
scientific papers, let alone a paper whose priority in taking protein X-ray photographs
was contested on the very same page of Nature.
Following a process of fifty years of social and conceptual development, the paper's
visionary, that is, scientifically incomplete aspects, were retrospectively declared to have
been a historical turning point rather than remaining a modest success, constrained by
technical and conceptual contingencies at its time of birth in 1934. The selection of an
inscriptional source of historical authenticity was a brilliant move, since other
contenders to the status of founders of molecular biology have not been able, so far, to
produce for themselves such an early authentic inscription.53
Similarly, an entire supportive cast of other inscriptions, both published and
unpublished, were introduced by the three keynote speakers, reflecting their awareness
that recollections alone are no longer sufficient to guarantee acceptance of scientists'
claims as historical facts. Included in that supportive cast of diversified inscriptions
were newly discovered letters and manuscripts, and quotations from published
scientific and historical documents by Bernai, especially his direct pronouncements on
the origins of molecular biology; such a reference further legitimized the keynote
speakers' historical understanding and position as deserving heirs by locating the
source of their historical preoccupation with the origins of molecular biology and with
protein X-ray crystallographers as its founders in the ancestor's own writings.
A second type of authenticity built into the anniversary's structure was temporal, as
the celebration was held on the authentic date of the inscription's submission to Nature
(something existing only in the memory of the surviving co-author and not in the public
record, which refers to the publication date only, some six weeks later, see Appendix 2).
339
This subtle point had not only conferred an additional measure of historical
authenticity upon the anniversary, but further signalled the increasing preoccupation
of the keynote speakers qua successor heroes with historical detail. Moreover, by
mirroring personal birthdays, this 'accuracy' in dating the origins of the birthmark of a
scientific group, draws on the participants' 'cultural bias' in treating anniversaries as
authentic marks of birth.
A third aspect of authenticity was physical, as the celebration site was selected to
coincide as closely as possible with the discovery site. Gesturing across the Cockcroft
Auditorium to the adjacent location of the once active laboratory of structural
crystallography, in which Bemal took the first X-ray protein photographs, conveyed a
more immediate sense of historical authenticity than if the celebration had been held in
an auditorium in London (where, after all, Bemal spent the greater part of his career).
A fourth aspect of authenticity was conceptual or derivative of the protein X-ray
crystallographers coming to pursue their means (structural studies) to an end
(biological function) as an end in its own right. As such, they became primarily
molecular structurists, while betting on Bernal's assumption that structure, once
solved, will automatically explain biological function. Though they may have never lost
sight of providing a molecular functional explanation of life phenomena, in practice
they inherited and perpetuated a conceptual primacy on molecular structure or
'conformation'.
Molecular structure is a key aspect of the synthesis underlying molecular biology, but
it is not exhaustive of it. By situating themselves at the 'molecular' pole of the metaphor
'molecular biology', while projecting the conformational aspect of molecular biology as
more basic, the protein X-ray crystallographers' inherited choice led to both
spectacular hits and misses. It is of course the nature of anniversaries that they focus on
successes rather than on failures. Thus, the anniversary emphasized how Bernal's vision
that the direct method of X-ray crystallography was the only way to resolve the structure
of a protein was vindicated by protein X-ray crystallographers, but was silent on their
missing other major breakthroughs such as alpha-helix, DNA structure, or the theory of
allostery.
A fifth aspect of authenticity was technical or derivative of the clan's commitment to
X-ray crystallography as a supreme, almost self-sufficient technique for attacking the
problem of protein, hormone, or virus structure. Unlike 'traitor' kin who abandoned
the primacy or singularity of this technique in the aftermath of a 1950 fiasco, briefly
alluded to by Perutz and otherwise well known from a secondary literature, the clan
never wavered in its primordial commitment to this technique qua tribal faith, even
though in later days they all came to complement it with many other, complementary
techniques.
A sixth aspect of authenticity was institutional, deriving from the fact that all the
keynote speakers had been institutionally associated with the principal investigatorturned-ancestor. The institutional precariousness of the ancestor, and the fact that all
three successor associates had relatively short institutional association with him, was not
emphasized, despite its profound implications for the clan's subsequent decentralized
structure and for the lack of overshadowing of the successors by the ancestor.
Last but not least, the seventh aspect of authenticity was political, or rather micropolitical, as the keynote speakers subscribed to a loyal rhetoric of descent or to a
pragmatic strategy of smooth succession. This contrasts with the quick subversion
strategy deployed by Crick, their one-time foster kin turned theoretical molecular
geneticist and DNA supr-hero. In this sense, they represent for the third generation
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scientists in the audience the historically authentic message that a slow strategy of
succession has paid off and consequently, that continuity with the past, rather than
rupture with it, is the career strategy to which they should aspire.
In fact, these quiet successor heroes departed from the subversive but also erratic
research strategy of their ancestor. They actually redefined their projects in concrete
structural and empirical terms, as opposed to the broader philosophical and theoretical
preoccupations of Bernai, which remained a lasting source of irreversible diversion.
Yet, the speakers chose to portray themselves as loyal followers even though their
departure is implied in the disparity between their own scientific accomplishments and
those of their mentor qua ancestor.
Klug, the latecomer would-be-successor hero, alone implied what may have been the
case for them all, namely that the successor associates greatly benefitted from the
ancestor's temperamental inability to pursue his own insights, that is, to complete, as
opposed to initiate, a research program. In contrast to the ancestor's disciplinary and
institutional marginality and avant garde conduct, the successor associate' conduct was
characterized by disciplinary and institutional accommodation. The micro-political
message to the future generation of scientists could not have been any clearer for being
historically so authentic.
All these seven layers of authenticity, experienced simultaneously by the participants
during the performative sessions, converged to transform the celebration into a special
vehicle of conferring social reality upon authentic, yet select, conceptions of historical
truth. Those conceptions were not only a matter of setting straight the record of the
past, but also provided a subtle guide for present conduct. Such an extrapolation
seemed inevitable, given the convergence of many impressive dimensions of historical
authenticity, carefully constructed and re-enacted throughout the duration of the
anniversary.
The temptation to regard such extrapolations as 'natural' was further increased
through the creation of a common discursive context by the keynote speakers, which
constantly blended various dimensions of historical authenticity with present
respresentations of scientific progress, culminating in the crescendo of a spectacular
computer graphics designed structure that was described as 'recent as yesterday'. This
striking colorful design evoked the inevitable question: 'What would have Bemal
thought about the possibilities of computer aided graphic design?' followed by the
participants vividly offering imaginary answers, while contesting each other's right to
speak in the name of the tentative thoughts of their ancestor.
3.2. Constructing the dan's imagery of scientific progress: Deleting the technical process and
highlighting a sequence of progressive atomic resolutions
Protein X-ray crystallographers spend a great deal of time on a slow process of
preparing crystals, photographing them from many angles and at different rates of
exposure with various types of increasingly sophisticated X-ray cameras, indexing
reflections with the aid of computer, and drawing density maps from which the
molecular pattern can be inferred. Indeed, the event being celebrated was strongly
related to the serendipity of obtaining proper crystals for the first protein X-ray
photograph as evidenced by a keynote speaker's insistence on producing an authentic
witness, who played inadvertedly a major role in creating this serendipidity.54
Yet, the performative action of the keynote speakers focused almost entirely on those
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relatively rare moments when these numerous contingent actions become a 'necessary'
or 'objective' structure of signification, that is, a high level resolution of the molecular
pattern. Furthermore, those temporal-rarities-turned-eternal incarnations of progress
were captured in slides, captioned by accompanying texts and/or narrative and flashed
in succession, punctuated by brief intervals of comment on the 'self-evident' or no
longer contested, nature of the displayed representation.
Indeed, all the speakers produced slides representing various stages of progressive
outcomes in their otherwise prolonged processes of crystallizing, photographing,
indexing, interpreting, and captioning virus, hormone, or protein structures. They
further arrranged their 'products' or outcomes in a progressive sequence, while
following the first protein X-ray photograph of pepsin in 1934 with the more extensive
pictures of insulin, a hormone for which the first Pattersons or vector diagrams were
constructed in 1935; eventually to be superseded by Fourier maps until the triumph of
a partial resolution in 1969.
Similarly, virus pictures were shown of low (i.e. 20 Angstrom, hereafter ),
intermediate (5.5 ) and high (2.8 ) degrees of resolution until the most recent
computer aided graphic design of a virus structure was dramatically displayed. Each talk
proceeded to move from a 'primitive' and primordial stage of scientific progress or low
resolution to the most recent or advanced one, or high resolution, while implying a
rational process of ever increasing progress. Despite brief allusions to 'bad ideas' or
blind alleys, the displays of quasi-totemic outcomes culminated with the colorful
computer-graphics designed patterns, thus celebrating the most advanced products of
the clan's scientific progress in an almost artistic form.
To some extent, the fiftieth anniversary of the first protein X-ray photograph's
commitment to historical authenticity was inevitable because of the existence of a wide
secondary literature by various species of metascientists (for example, historians,
philosophers, sociologists, investigative journalists). Yet, despite the occasional
allusions to 'slow progress', 'bad ideas' or blind alleys, the celebration provided no
forum for drawing lessons from the clan's equally important experience of historically
authentic failures.
Included in those briefly alluded to failures were an array of supposed empirical
'impediments' such as the dogmatic adherence to crystallographic biases of perfect
order or integral number of primary structure units per fold of the secondary
structure; the belated recognition of artifacts or reflections that were exceptional
rather than typical of proteins in general; the dismissal of stereochemical knowledge as
crucial in decoding spatial structures and of model building as a heuristic strategy for
deriving complex structures; the phase problem, eventually solved by the heavy atom
replacement method (which was adopted only slowly because of the clan's depreciation
of other experimental strategies and theoretical orientations, originating outside the
clan's certified repertory of tools and beliefs).
This de-emphasis of many episodes of failure suggests that the celebration's meaning
cannot be understood in the separate terms of historical authenticity or of scientific
progress. The celebration appears to have been first and foremost a social medium for
creating congruence between these two registers. The celebration revolved around a
dual attempt to convey historical authenticity and scientific progress, not for their own
sakes, but for a higher purpose: instilling allegiance to a particular vision of the past
precipitates an identification with the past that has concrete ethical and political
implications for the future of the clan. Re-enacting the past in authentic ways, however
partial, thus becomes a means for creating future obligations, while articulating a moral
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PNINA ABIR-AM
and intellectual debt of all the descendants to their ancestor and his associates, the
keynote speakers or successor heroes.
The first protein X-ray photograph and its descendant patterns or 'organized
reflections' are the currency determining exchange and flow of action among the clan's
members as well as a unique, collective property that the clan members may trade,
individually and collectively, for other scientific currencies which they may need, such
as chromatograms, sedimentograms, and electron microscopic pictures. The X-ray
patterns become symbolic nexes around which the entire 'form of life' in protein X-ray
crystallography revolves. The raison d'etre of that form of life is to produce complete
structural solutions.
Hence, the keynote speakers' private turned public ownership of precious 'patterns',
such as the first or only fully solved structures, of a virus, a hormone, or a protein, as
well as their ownership of authentic recollections, reflect the totemic status of certain
X-ray photographs for the protein X-ray crystallographers' clan. At the same time, their
performative action reflects the taboo of admitting the limitations of their venerated
method for molecular biology at large (limitations made famous by the accounts of the
double helix story in which adherence to crystallographic principles proved to be
counterproductive). In this manner, the third generation disciples will be sure to
emulate the exemplary conduct of the successor heroes, leading to the possession of
such 'riches' of patterns, and hence to a strategic location in the group's genealogy of
morals and authority.
The uniqueness of the protein X-ray crystallographers' products is embodied in these
patterned reflections that they alone create, interpret, own and trade on the scientific
marketplace of results on protein structure. The protein X-ray photograph becomes
the fountain nourishing the protein X-ray crystallographers' unique 'form of life'. This
form of life, intersecting the growth of crystals, their X-ray photographing, indexing
and interpreting in terms of molecular and atomic patterns, is not embodied in the
crystal, or in the X-ray camera, or in the mathematical Patterson or Fourier techniques,
but rather in the X-ray photograph that integrates, in itself, all these aspects into a
unitary coherent, interprtable, and convertible framework.
4. Conclusion. The epistemological complementarity of historical authenticity and

scientific progress in a scientific anniversary
The performative action and setting at the fiftieth anniversary of the first X-ray
protein photograph was modest and humble when compared to the pomp and
circumstances surrounding more exotic ethnographic settings such as the Negara
Theatre in Bali or even a Honorary Degrees ceremony at Cambridge University.
Indeed, so big was the pomp at one such ceremony, which I was able to attend two
months later in the Senate House due to my College Senior Tutor's unexpected
ethnographic foresight, that I preferred to immerse myself in the more trivial pleasure
of 'mere' participating rather than observing. Hopefully, other, more pomp-oriented
colleagues, may one day write on the spectacular gown and sword of the Chancellor,
the Duke of Edinburgh, and the procession in which the Vice-Chancellor, who was at
that time the Master of Downing College, led the recipients, in their colorful silky
gowns, via King's Parade.55
The question even persists as to whether the scientific anniversary can be usefully
described as a social ritual, not only because of its relative lack of pomp but also because
343
of its complex epistemological status as an interdisciplinary research object. Some

anthropologists regard the concept of ritual as so sacred for their discipline that they
resist its application to the supposed anti-thesis of ritual in 'primitive' society, a
scientific anniversary of unbounded reason and inevitable progress. Many historians of
science like to complain about the superfluous social science jargon supposedly
contaminating their discipline and its pure legacy as a history of disembodied ideas.
Some scientists regard it as demeaning for their dignified enterprise to be addressed by
methods originally developed for primitive societies.
Despite the striking modesty conveyed by the keynote speaker Nobelists and their
self-deprecatory humor, the scientific anniversary had many features of a social drama.
A demanding role of playing the historically credible scientific leader has been reenacted three times, by each of the keynote speakers, in three comparable sessions. The
repetitive actions of presenting slides, yet supplying alternating discourses on past
memories and present accomplishments, created the desired impression of a smooth
continuity between the narrated historical authenticity and displayed scientific
progress. Visibly marked by their grey-white hair and other signs of long term presence,
the keynote speakers enacted credibly their dual relevance as witnesses of the past and
actors in the present.
Through their performative action, revolving around a skilful, even virtuoso,
alternating of past memories and present representations of progress, they lived, for
the duration of their performance, in both the ancestral realm and the mundane,
everyday realm of relentless pursuit of the latest scientific advance. Their recollections
of the ancestor and episodes of contact with him cast them as embodiments of his spirit
by virtue of the multi-dimensional historical authenticity that they were able to project.
At the same time, their verbal explanations of numerous scientific results, venerated in
the present as symbols of success by protein X-ray crystallographers, cast them as
members of the clan, who share its mundane preoccupations with results.
The keynote speakers alone can thus identify with and represent the ancestor,
whose spirit and vision they inherited. However, they can also identify with and
represent the ordinary members who are still concerned with ongoing progress by
recalling their own prolonged existence as ordinary members until their later
emergence as heroes. By sharing their sole accessibility to the ancestral realm with
other clan members in a public forum, while also being attentive to the members'
ongoing mundane preoccupations, the heroes create a common discourse capable of
fusing the past and the present. Their unique personal characteristics (biologically
spanning the past and the present) and their performative action (alternating
historical recollections with accounts of scientific progress in the present) further
reinforce this fusion.
Indeed, the enshrined inscription that became the celebration's raison d'tre
symbolizes this unique position of the heroes as collaborators of both the ancestor and
the third generation clan members. The anniversary thus re-enacts the heroes' position
as venerated sources of both scientific success and social continuity, while legitimizing
their actual succession with the collective consent of a participatory rite. Their special
role emerges as presiding over generational succession and continuity or over a
dialectic of mutual need. While the clan members are reminded that they as individuals
and their community as a supra-individual entity would not have existed without the
ancestor's vision, the ancestor could not have been recognized as such, were it not for the
successful reproduction of the clan. Its dual, social and conceptual, reproduction was
mediated by the keynote speakers qua deserving heirs.
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PNINA ABIR-AM
Hence, they also preside over the clan's acquisition of collective identity and memory.
While the ancestor 'initiated' the protein X-ray photograph as a source of life, a
common 'ground', the heroes were those who persevered in making many other protein
X-ray photographs fully interprtable. Commanding, thus, unique assets in the
scientific estate at large, the heroes' translation of the ancestor's vision into pragmatic
research programs enabled the clan to prosper, reproduce, and celebrate 'its'
anniversary.
In this manner, the heroes secure legitimation and representation power from their
clan not only scientifically, but also historically. Through their performance, the
keynote speakers constitute themselves as historical authorities and as legitimate
guardians of the clan's common past. The clan's success and very survival has been
reaffirmed through the continuity, performative as well as discursive, between the
realm of the heroes, who are possessed by their initiation glory in the past, and the
realm of the clan members at large, who are possessed by their expectations for future
glory.
Decoding the complex social ritual involved in enacting scientific commemorations
thus reveals a dialectics of mutual need between scientific discoveries and communities;
while a discovery cannot be said to be one unless it is picked up as an object of celebration by
a scientific clan or community, such a community must show descent from a major
discovery in order to secure its claims to ethical and political leadership of science in the
present.
Before we can contemplate the fiftieth anniversary of historical ethnography of
scientific commemorations and related rituals, this new form of interdisciplinary
endeavor must first develop and explore an agenda of its own (so it could become the
object of claims of intellectual descent).
A tentative agenda for historical ethnography may feature some of the following
questions:
(a) Is the process of claiming collective conceptual and social descent from
discoveries different or similar across disciplines? For example, physicists
celebrated in the 1980s many fiftieth anniversaries of their own, such as the
discoveries of the positron and fission, among others.56
(b) Are the strategies of claiming descent from a discovery similar or different across
clans in the same discipline but in different countries? For example, Morrell has
studied research schools of chemistry in Scotland and Germany, Nye has been
studying research schools of chemistry in Manchester and Paris, while Abir-Am
has been studying research schools of molecular biology in UK, USA, and
France.57 In all these cases, the distinct cultural and national context of science
has affected the way collective memories of scientific clans are constructed,
validated, and invested with authority.
(c) Is there a difference in such collective strategies across historical periods,
especially those separated by real, or apparent, scientific revolutions? For
example, the disciples of Galileo's in the seventeenth century and those of
Jacques Monod in the twentieth century deployed both different and similar
strategies for claiming descent from specific scientific innovations associated
with their charismatic mentors.58 Only such a broadly conceived, comparative
study of scientific anniversaries across disciplines, historical periods and
countries can shed a new light on the role of performative anniversaries in the
formation of science's social memory as the 'mode of cognition of Western
civilization'.
345
Notes
1. The reversed chronology in the sub-title was inspired by ZEMON DAVIS, N. 'Rabelais among the censors
(1940s, 1540s)', Representations (Fall 1990), No. 32, pp. 1-32.
2. For a comprehensive analysis of scientific eulogies see PAUL, C. B. Science and Immortality: The Eloges of the
Paris Academy of Sciences (1699-1791), University of California Press, Berkeley (1980); see also OUTRAM, D.
'The language of natural power: the "Eloges" of Georges Cuvier and the public language of 19th Century
science', History of Science, 13 (1976), pp. 101-37; FISHER, N. 'Heroes and hero-worship: history of chemistry
in the 19th Century', pp. 1-38, presented to Aaron Ihde to mark his retirement, 1980; ABIR-AM, P. G. 'How
scientists view their heroes: some remarks on the mechanisms of myth construction', Journal of the History of
Biology, 15 (1982), pp. 281-315. On the formation of collective memory see HALBWACH, M. The Collective
Memory, Harper & Row, New York (1980); HOBSBAWM, E. and RANGER, I. (eds) The Invention of Tradition,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1983); CONNERTON, P. How Societies Remember, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge (1989). On memory and counter-memory see FOUCAULT, M. Language, CounterMemory, Practice, Cornell University Press (1977); ZEMON DAVIS, N. and STARN, R. 'Introduction to special
issue: memory and counter-memory', Representations (Spring 1989), No. 26, pp. 1-6; NORA, P. 'Between
memory and history: Les lieux de mmoire', Representations (Spring 1989), No. 26, pp. 7-25; KNAPP, S.
'Collective memory and the actual past', Representations (Spring 1989), No. 26, pp. 123-149. BOURCUET,
M. N., VALENSI, L. and WACHTEL, N. (eds) 'Between memory and history', Volume 2, Issue 2 of HUMPHREY,
C. et al. (eds), History and Anthropology, Harwood, London; FRIEDLANDER, S. 'Collective memory' (Lecture
delivered at Tel Aviv University, January 1985), History & Memory, Vol. 1, pp. 3-330.
3. KNAPP (1989), pp. 123-4 (see note 2). For historical studies of the cultural context of science see BARNES,
B. and SHAPIN, S. (eds), Historical Studies of Scientific Cultures, Routledge, London (1979); MENDELSOHN, E.
and ELKANA, Y. (eds), Sciences and Cultures, Reidel, Boston (1981). For sociological analyses of scientific
texts see GILBERT, N. G. and Mulkay, M. Opening Pandora's Box, A Sociological Analysis of Scientists'
Discourse, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1984); CALLON, M., LAW, J. and RIP, A. (eds), Texts and
their Powers: Mapping the Dynamics of Science, Routledge, London (1986).
4. See for example, LATOUR, B. and WOOLGAR, S. Laboratory Life, The Social Construction of Scientific Facts,
Sage, London (1979), Princeton University Press, Princeton (1986); KNORR-CETINA, K. D. The Manufacture
of Knowledge, Pergamon, New York (1981); LYNCH, M. Art and Artifact in Science: Work Talk and Work Shop
in a Neuroscience Laboratory, Routledge, London (1985); LATOUR, B. Science in Action: How to Follow
Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass (1987) DUBINSKAS, F. A.
(ed.), Making time, Ethnographies of High-Technology Organizations, Temple University Press, Philadelphia
(1988); TRAWEEK, S. Beamtime and Lifetime: The World of High Energy Physics, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass. (1988); CHARLESWORTH, M., FARRALL, L., STOKES, T. and TURNBULL, D. Life among the
Scientists, An Anthropological Study of an Australian Scientific Community, Oxford University Press, New York
(1989); LATOUR, B. 'Postmodern? No, simply amodern! Steps toward an anthropology of science', Studies
in History & Philosophy of Science, 21 (1990), pp. 145-171; Biagioli, M. 'The anthropology of
incommensurability', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 21 (1990), pp. 183-209. The quotation
'19th Century anthropology' is from Latour, personal communication to the author, Paris, June 1986.
5. On the changing requirements of the ethnographic genre as a professional desideratum among
anthropologists in the last decade, including the increasing role of self-ethnography see for example,
BOON, J. Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, History,
Religion and Texts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1982); CLIFFORD, J. 'Fieldwork, reciprocity
and the making of ethnographic texts: The example of Maurice Leenhardt', Man (N.S.), 15 (1980), pp.
518-532; CLIFFORD, J. The Predicament of Culture, 20th Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1988); CLIFFORD, J. and MARCUS, G. E. (eds), Writing Culture, The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, Berkeley (1988); FABIAN, J. Time and the
Other, How Anthropology Makes its Object, Columbia University Press, New York (1983); FRIEDMAN, J.
'Beyond otherness or: The spectacularization of anthropology', Telos, 71 (1987), pp. 161-170; GEERTZ, C.
Local Knowledge, Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, Basic Books, New York (1983); GEERTZ, C.
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford University Press Stanford (1988); LEACH, E. 'Tribal
ethnography: Past, present, future', Cambridge Anthropology, 11 (1986), pp. 1-14; MARCUS, G. E. 'Rhetoric
and the ethnographic genre in anthropological research', Current Anthropology, 21 (1980), pp. 507-510;
MARCUS, G. E. and CUSHMAN, R. 'Ethnographies as texts', Annual Review of Anthropology, 11 (1982), pp.
25-69; MARCUS, G. E. and FISCHER, M. M. J. Anthropology as Cultural Critique, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago (1986).
6. MULKAY, M. J. 'The ultimate compliment: A sociological analysis of ceremonial discourse', Sociology, 18
(1984), pp. 531-549; MULKAY, M. J. 'Celebrations' in The Word and the World, Allen & Unwin, London
(1985), Chapter 4. See also, MCKINLEY, A. and POTTER, J. 'Model discourse: Interpretative repertoires in
scientists' conference talk', Social Studies of Science, 17 (1987), pp. 443-463; TRICE, H. M. and BEYER, J. M.
'Studying organizational cultures through rites and ceremonials', Journal of Management Review, 9 (1984),
pp. 653-669.
7. CHARLESWORTH et al. (1989), especially pp. 20-37 (see note 4).
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PNINA ABIR-AM
8. LA FONTAINE, J. 'Invisible custom, public lectures as ceremonials', Anthropology Today, 2 (1986), pp. 3-9;
LA FONTAINE, J. (ed.), The Interpretation of Ritual, Essays in Honor of Audrey I. Richards, Tavistock, London
(1972). See also, ABELES, M. 'Modern political ritual: ethnography of an inauguration and a pilgrimage by
President Mitterand', Current Anthropology, 29 (1988), pp. 391-404; MOORE, S. F. and MYERHOFF, B. G.
(eds), Secular Ritual, Van Gorcum, Amsterdam (1977).
9. BOGEN, D. and LYNCH, M. 'Taking account of the hostile native: Plausible deniability and the production of
conventional history in the Iran-Contra Hearings', Social Problems, 36 (1989), pp. 197-224; the quotation
is from p. 197.
10. LOMNITZ, L. 'The scientific meeting: An anthropologist's point of view', 4S Review, 1 (Summer 1983), pp.
2-7. Similar observations were made by Susan D. Brown of Cambridge University, Barbara Fraenkel of
Lehigh University, and Bernice Kaplan of Wayne University, from their experience as anthropologists
occasionally accompanying their natural scientist spouses to meetings.
11. TURNER, V. W. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Societies, Cornell University Press,
New York (1974); TURNER, V. W. 'Process, system and symbol: A new anthropological synthesis', Daedalus,
106 (1977), pp. 61-80; TURNER, V. W. 'Introduction' in TURNER, V. W. (ed.), Celebration: Studies in Festivity
and Ritual, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC (1982).
12. GEERTZ (1983), pp. 27-29 (see note 5).
13. TAMBIAH, S. E. 'A performative approach to ritual', Proceedings of the British Academy, LXV (1981), pp.
113-169; TAMBIAH, S. E. 'Ritual as thought and action' in his Culture, Thought and Social Action, An
Anthropological Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1985), pp. 17-168.
14. See for example, SHAPIN, S. and SCHAFFER, S. Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental
Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton (1985); RUDWICK, M. J. S. The Great Devonian Controversy,
Chicago University Press (1985); Biagioli, M. 'Galileo's system of patronage', History of Science, 28
(1990a), pp. 1-62; BIAGIOLI, M. 'Galileo the emblem maker', ISIS, 81 (1990b), pp. 230-258.
15. See for example, SRINIVASAN, P. R., FRUTON, J. S., and EDSALL, J. T. (eds), The Origins of Modern
Biochemistry: A Retrospect on Proteins, New York Academy of Sciences, New York (1979); and the essay
review of the collection by ABIR-AM, P. G. British Journal for the History of Science, 15 (1982), pp. 301-5.
16. ABIR-AM, P. G. The 'Biotheoretical Gathering' and the Origins of Molecular Biology in England, 1932-1938;An
Essay on the Construction, Legitimation and Authority of Scientific Knowledge in a Historical Context, Universit
de Montreal, Ph.D. thesis, 1984), 531 pp. For an abbreviated version see ABIR-AM, P. G. 'The
Biotheoretical Gathering, transdisciplinary authority and the incipient legitimation of molecular biology in
the 1930s: New perspective on the historical sociology of science', History of Science, 25 (1987), pp. 1-70.
17. See discussion and references in ABIR-AM, P. G. 'Themes, genres and orders of legitimation in the rise of
new disciplines: Deconstructing the historiography of molecular biology', History of Science, 23 (1985), pp.
73-117.
18. See discussion and references in ABIR-AM, P. G. 'From biochemistry to molecular biology: DNA and the
acculturated journey of the critic of science Erwin Chargaff', History and Philosophy of Life Sciences, 2
(1980), pp. 3-60; see also ABIR-AM (1982), pp. 281-315 (see note 2).
19. ABIR AM (1987), pp. 1-70 (see note 16).
20. The idea to introduce my historical ethnography as an historian's dream was given to me in the summer of
1986, in Paris, as part of comments on my initial ethnography, by the late Francoise Bastide (1947-1988),
a pioneer in the semiotic analysis of scientific texts, see for example. BASTIDE, F. 'Iconographie des textes
scientifiques: Principes d'analyse', Culture Technique, 14 (1985), pp. 132-151; LATOUR, B. and BASTIDE, F.
'Essai de sciencefabrication', Etudes Francaises, 19 (1984), pp. 111-133.
21. See ABIR-AM (1982), pp. 281-315 (see note 2) and ABIR-AM (1985), pp. 73-117 (see note 17); ABIR-AM,
P. G. Research schools of molecular biology in the US, UK and France, 1920-1970: A historical ethnography of
transnational collaborations on the secrets of life (forthcoming).
22. American groups asserted their status as founders of molecular biology in the mid- and !ate-1960s, while
the French asserted theirs in the early and late 1970s; see CAIRNS, J., STENT, G. S., and WATSON, J. D. (eds),
Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Press (1966); RICH, A. and Davidson, N.
(eds), Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biology, San Francisco (1968). MONOD, J. and BOREK, E. (eds),
Microbes and Life, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (1971); LWOFF, A. and ULLMANN, A. (eds), Origins of
Molecular Biology, A Tribute to Jacques Monod, New York, Academic Press (1979).
23. The corrida motif was adapted from Francois Jacob's description of a confrontation between Jacques
Monod and Sol Spiegelman in the early 1950s, in his The Inner Statue, Basic Books, New York (1988), a
book that I have reviewed as part of ABIR-AM, P. G. 'Nobelesse oblige: lives of molecular biologists', ISIS,
82 (June 1991), pp. 326-343.
24. BARNES, B. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory, Routledge, London (1974); BLOOR, D. Science and
Social Imagery, Routledge, London (1976); ELKANA, Y. 'Introduction: Culture, cultural system, and
science' in COHEN, R. S. (ed.), Essays in Honor of Imre Lakatos, Reidel, Boston (1976), pp. 99-107; ELKANA,
Y. 'Science as a cultural system: An anthropological approach' in Scientific Culture in the Contemporary
World, UNESCO, Milan (1980), pp. 269-290; BARNES and SHAPIN (eds, 1979), (see note 3); MENDELSOHN
and ELKANA (eds, 1981), (see note 3).
25. DOUGLAS, M. Natural Symbols, Pantheon, New York (1970); DOUGLAS, M. Implicit Meanings, Routledge,
London (1975); Douglas, M. (ed.), The Sociology of Perception, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London (1982).
347
26. GEERTZ, C. The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York (1973); GEERTZ (1983) (see note 5).
27. For references and an evaluation of ethnographic histories, especially of EMANUEL LE ROY LADURIE'S
Montaillou, Brazillier, New York (1978) see ROSALDO, R. 'From the door to his tent: The fieldwork and the
inquisitor' in CLIFFORD and MARCUS (eds, 1988), pp. 77-97 (see note 5); see also COHN, B. 'History and
anthropology; Toward a rapprochement', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1981), pp. 227-252;
AUCE, M. The Anthropological Circle, Symbol, Function, History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
(1982); CLIFFORD (1988) Part 4 (Histories) (see note 5). For ethnographically informed histories of science
see SHAPIN and SCHAFFER (1985) (see note 14); RUDWICK (1985) (see note 14); BIAGIOLI (1990a, b) (see note
14).
28. S. Schaffer, co-author of Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), (see note 14), one of very few book-size,
ethnographically informed, histories of science, eventually joined the History and Philosophy of Science
Department at Cambridge University in the Fall of 1984, two months after I had left Cambridge.
29. Humphrey is an expert on Soviet Asiatic societies and an Editor of History and Anthropology, Harwood,
London, UK. On her scientist father, the late Conrad Hal Waddington, F.R.S. (1905-1975) see Alan
Robertson's memoir in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 23 (1977), pp. 575-622.
30. For the meeting's program see Appendix 1. For a report on the meeting by its co-organizers, see DODSON,
G. and CHOTHIA, C. 'The 50th anniversary of the first protein X-ray photo, Nature, 309 (1984), p. 309; the
reference of the first protein X-ray photograph is in BERNAL, J. D. and CROWFOOT, D. 'X-ray photographs
of crystalline pepsin', Nature, 311, (26 May 1934), pp. 794-5 (see Appendix 2).
For an overview of Bernal's scientific career, see Hodgkin, D. C. 'John Desmond Bernal, 1901-1971',
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 26 (1980), pp. 17-85; see also SNOW, C. P. 'John
Desmond Bernal, 1901-1971', Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Suppl. 1. Snow's The Search, Scribner's,
New York (1934) is based on many events and characters from Bernal's career, see the review by Bernal's
close friends, NEEDHAM, J. and NEEDHAM, D. M. 'A crystallographic Arrowsmith', Nature, 134 (1936), p.
890.
For Bernal's own view of his early approach to the problem of protein structure, see BERNAL, J. D.
'William Thomas Astbury, 1898-1961', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 9 (1963), pp.
1-35; BERNAL, J. D. 'The patten of Linus Pauling's work in relation to molecular biology in RICH, A. and
DAVIDSON, N. (eds), Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biology, Freeman, San Francisco (1968), pp.
370-82; see also ABIR-AM (1987) (see note 16).
For an overview of Crowfoot Hodgkin's career see DODSON, G., GLUSKER, J. P., and SAYRE, D. (eds),
Structural Studies on Molecules of Biological Interest, A volume in Honor of Professor Dorothy Hodgkin,
Oxford University Press, Oxford (1981); see also ABIR-AM, P. G. 'Leadership and gender in science:
Dorothy C. Hodgkin and the Oxford school of biomolecular crystallography', paper read at the Meeting
of the American Chemical Society, 24 April 1990.
For a sociological study of British protein X-ray crystallography see LAW, J. 'The Development of
specialties in science: the case of X-ray protein crystallography', Science Studies, 3 (1973), pp. 275-303. For
many personal recollections see EWALD, P. (ed.), Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, A. Oosthoek's
Uitgeiersmaatschappij N.V., Utrecht (1962); MCLACHLAN, D. and Glusker, J. P. (eds), Crystallography in
North America, American Crystallographic Association, New York (1983).
31. McKay co-edited the first and still only Bernal 'festschrift', marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of his
pioneering treatise of science policy, The social function of Science, see GOLDSMITH, M. and MCKAY, A. (eds),
The Science of Science, New York (1964). See also, NAKAYAMA, S. 'J. D. Bernal, Founder of science policy
studies, and the later development of the discipline', Science and Public Policy (1989), pp. 15-16.
I had already met McKay two months earlier, in February 1984, when his collaborator, on a team
studying the history of X-ray crystallography, which was based in the Dept. of Crystallography at Birkbeck
College, London, sponsored my guest lecture in their History of Science seminar. On that occasion,
McKay graciously gave me a tour of the Department of Crystallography, while patiently explaining many
departmental monuments including antique X-ray equipment, various structural models, pictures and
engravings of Bernal, among more recent graphical representation of molecular structures.
32. American groups asserted their status as founders of molecular biology in the mid- and late 1960s, while
the French asserted theirs in the early and late 1970s (see note 22).
33. See KLUG, A. 'From macromolecules to biological assemblies' (Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1982),
Bioscience Reports, 3 (1983), pp. 395-430. Klug is also known as a former collaborator of Rosalind
Franklin, see KLUG, A. 'Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of the structure of DNA', Nature, 219 (1968),
pp. 808-810, 843-4, 879, 880, 1192; KLUG, A. 'Rosalind Franklin and the double helix', Nature, 248
(1974), pp. 787-8.
34. See Appendix 3. See also, BLOOMER, A. et al. 'Protein disk of tobacco mosaic virus at 2.8 resolution
showing the interactions within and between subunits', Nature, 276 (1978), pp. 362-8.
35. See HEINEMANN, M. 'Louis MacNeice, John Cornford and Clive Branson: three left wing poets' and
KETTLE, A. 'Poetry and Politics in the Thirties', in CLARK, J. et al. (eds), Culture and Crisis in Britain in the
Thirties, Lawrence & Wishart, London (1979), pp. 103-132 and pp. 83-102; see also Branson, N. and
HEINEMANN, M. Britain in the 1930s, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London (1971). On Bernal's political
activities see WERSKY, G. The Visible College, A Collective Biography of British Socialist Scientists, Allen Lane,
London (1978). See also WOOD, N. Communism and British Intellectuals, Columbia University Press, New
348
PNINA ABIR-AM
York (1959); ROSE, H. 'Talking about science in three colors: Bernal and gender politics in the social
studies of science', Science Studies, 3 (July 1990), pp. 5-19.
36. On the Theoretical Biology Club, see ABIR-AM, P. G. (1987) (see note 16). Rimel's recollections agree with
material from Bernal's Archive, The Manuscript Room, Cambridge University Library, and with the
recollections of Bernal's wife, Eileen (Sprague) Bernal (1899-), communications to the author in London,
November 1983 and May 1984.
37. See HODGKIN, D. C. and RILEY, D. P. 'Some ancient history of protein X-ray analysis' in RICH and
DAVIDSON (eds, 1968), pp. 15-28 (see note 22); see also, HODGKIN, D. C. 'X-ray measurements and the
structure of protein molecules as they are' in SRINIVASAN, P. R., FRUTON, J. S., and EDSALL, J. T. (eds), The
Origins of Modern Biochemistry: A Retrospect on Proteins, New York (1979), pp. 121-148; see also the essays
by J. S. Fruton, N. W. Pirie, F. Hawrowitz, J. T. Edsall, J. W. Williams, A. H. Gordon, and E. L. Smith. See
also HODGKIN, D. C. 'Patterson or Pattersons' in GLUSKER, J. P. et al. (eds), Patterson and Pattersons, Fifty
years of the Patterson Function, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York (1987), pp. 167-193; see
also DODSON, GLUSKER, and SAYRE (eds) (1981), (see note 30).
38. On Philpot (1911-) see Balliol College Alumni Book, Oxford; personal communications to the author,
Oxford, 7 and 9 June 1984. On The Svedberg and the department of physical chemistry at the University
of Uppsala see KERKER, M. 'The Svedberg and molecular reality', ISIS, 67 (1976), pp. 190-216; RANBY, B.
'Svedberg Centennial Symposium', Uppsala Newsletter in History of Science, 2 (1984), pp. 6-7, which
features a picture of Svedberg's staff including Mrs Eriksson-Quensel.
39. See BLUNDELL, T. et al. 'Symmetry in the organization and structure of proteins' in DODSON, et al. (1981),
pp. 390-403 (see note 30).
40. See also HODGKIN, and RILEY (1968) (see note 39).
41. See ADAMS, M. G. et al. Nature, 224 (1969), pp. 491-2; see Appendix 4.
42. On the Rockefeller Foundation's support of protein research in the 1930s, see ABIR-AM, P. G. 'The
discourse on physical power and biological knowledge in the 1930s: A Reappraisal of the Rockefeller
Foundation's policy in molecular biology', Social Studies of Science, 12 (1982), pp. 341-382.
43. Perutz has written numerous scientific articles and popular reviews on haemoglobin. Among the most
recent ones are PERUTZ, M. 'Stereochemical mechanism of oxygen transport by haemoglobin', Proceedings
of the Royal Society, B, 208 (1980), pp. 135-62; PERUTZ, M. 'Hemoglobin structure and respiratory
transport', Scientific American, 239, pp. 92-125 (1978); PERUTZ, M. 'Life with living molecules', New
Scientist, 21 October 1976. For his Nobel Lecture (1962) see 'X-ray analysis of hemoglobin', Nature, 140
(1963), pp. 863-69. Historical recollections are included in PERUTZ, M. 'Origins of molecular biology',
New Scientist, 31 January 1980, pp. 326-9; PERUTZ, M. 'Bragg, protein crystallography and the Cavendish
laboratory', Acta Crystallographica, A26 (1970), pp. 183-5; PERUTZ, M. 'The MRC Unit for Molecular
Biology', New Scientist, 271, (1962). See also his recent collection of essays, Is Science Necessary? Essays on
Science and Scientists, Barrie & Jenkins, London (1989).
44. See BRAGG, W. L. Proceedings of the Royal Society, A, 89 (1913), p. 248; BRAGG, Sir L. The Development of Xray Analysis, G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., London (1975); see also PERUTZ (1970), pp. 183-5 (see note 43).
BERNAL, J. D. 'The structure of proteins', Nature, 143 (1939), pp. 663-7; 'The problem of the origins of
life: A discussion between Sir William H. Bragg, O.M., F.R.S. and Professor J. D. Bernal, F.R.S.', in Science
Lifts the Veil, British Council Publications, London (1942), pp. 87-95 (Perutz's quotation is from p. 91).
45. See also BRAGG, Sir L., KENDREW, J. C. and PERUTZ, M. F. 'Polypeptide chain configurations in crystalline
proteins', Proceedings of the Royal Society, A, 203 (1950), pp. 321-357; On this story and Bragg's own use of
the term 'fiasco' see OLBY, R. The Path to the Double Helix, MacMillan, London (1974), Chapter 18; OLBY,
R. 'The "mad pursuit", X-ray crystallographers' search for the structure of haemoglobin', History and
Philosophy of Life Sciences, 7 (1985), pp. 171-93.
46. On I. Fankuchen, see BERNAL, J. D. 'Professor Isidor Fankuchen', Nature, 203 (1964), pp. 916-7; BERNAL,
J. D. and FANKUCHEN, I. 'The structure of viruses', Journal of General Physiology, 25 (1941), pp. 111-39;
ABIR-AM, P. G. 'Archival Report on the Personal Papers of I. Fankuchen, 1904-1964 at the Center for the
History of Physics, New York City', Newsletter of the Survey of Sources in the History of Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology, No. 10, (1979), pp. 9-11 (American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia).
47. WATSON, H. 'The stereochemistry of the protein myoglobin', Progress in Stereochemistry, 4 (1969), pp.
299-333.
48. BENNETT, J. F. and KENDREW, J. C. Acta Crystallographica, 5 (1952), pp. 109-16. See KENDREW, J. C. et al.
Nature, 181 (1958, pp. 666 (G. Bodo, first author); KENDREW, J. C. 'Myoglobin and the structure of
proteins', (Nobel Lecture), Science, 139 29 March 1964), pp. 259-66. For Kendrew's views on the origins
of molecular biology see 'How molecular biology started?', Scientific American, 216 (1967), pp. 241-3;
KENDREW, J. C. 'Some remarks on the history of molecular biology', Biochemical Society Symposia, 30 (1970),
pp. 5-10. On the debate between Kendrew and Stent see ABIR-AM (1985), (see note 17).
49. Anonymous referee reports, with the author. For an interim, brief summary see the Proceedings of the
Anglo-American Conference in History of Science (July 1988), pp. 101-7.
50. ABIR-AM, P. G. 'Scientists' collective memory and the actual past: Accounting for scientists and historians's
diverse views of the origins of molecular biology' (forthcoming).
51. The interpretation of the X-ray photograph as the source of professional life for protein X-ray
crystallographers was inspired by DUBINSKAS, F. and TRAWEEK, S. 'Closer to the ground: A reinterpretation
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
349
of Walbiri iconography', Man, (N.S.), 19 (1984), pp. 15-30. I wish to thank Sharon Traweek for giving me
this reprint following our acquaintance at the EASST-4S Joint Sarton Memorial Meeting in Ghent,
November 1984, which I did not understand at the time but which proved most inspiring in the summer of
1985, when I set to interpret my field notes of April 1984.
For details see ABIR-AM (1984) (see note 16) and ABIR-AM (1987) (see note 16).
Other collective claims of scientists to founder status in their own history as would-be molecular biologists
point to events in the early 1940s, for example, CAIRNS et al. (eds, 1966) (see note 22); MONOD and BOREK
(eds, 1971) (see note 22).
For methods of X-ray crystallography see LIPSON, H. and COCHRAN, W. The Determination of Crystal
Structure, G. Bell & Sons, London (1966); for historical recollections of methods see GLUSKER et al. (eds),
1987 (see note 37); MCLACHLAN, D. and GLUSKER, J. P. (eds) Crystallography in North America, American
Crystallographic Association, New York (1983).
Paul Rabinow suggested to me in 1990 that I should compare my scientists' celebration with other
academic rituals in Cambridge, such as the honorary degree ceremony, because the academic rather than
the 'primitive' or exotic ritual was the real context of scientific celebrations. However, as stated above, I
preferred to simply enjoy myself at non-scientific academic ritual, while deliberately failing to assume an
ethnographic posture; such a comparison will have to wait for the re-enactment of someone's (my own?)
myth of eternal return to Cambridge, UK, the historical ethnographer's paradise.
See for example, BROWN, L., DRESDEN, M., and HODDESON, L. (eds), Pions to Quarks, 1985, International
Symposium on Particle Physics in the 1950s, Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1985).
MORRELL, J. 'The chemist breeders: The research schools of Liebig and Thomas Thomson', Ambix, 19
(1972), pp. 1-46; NYE, M. J. 'Two research schools at the first Solvay Chemistry Conferences, 1922-1928',
Annals of Science, 46 (1989), pp. 461-480; ABIR-AM, P. G., forthcoming (see note 21).
On Galileo's mentors and disciples see BIAGIOLI (1990a, b) (see note 14); on Monod's mentors and
disciples see ABIR-AM (1982), pp. 281-315 (see note 2).
APPENDIX 1 .
BRITISH CRYSTALLOGRAPHIC ASSOCIATION
5 0 th ANNIVERSARY OF THE PEPSIN X RAT PHOTOGRAPH
a nouncaa a M eting Co ark tha
F ri da y 13 April 1 9 8 4
S Oth ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST X RAT PROTEIN PHOTOGRAPH
Cockcroft Theatre, New Museum S i t e ,

Downing S t re e t , Cambridge
The first X ray diffraction pattern of a globular protein

(pepsin) was obtained by J. D. Bernai and p. Crowfoot In 1934.
A meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary will take place
In Cambridge on FRIDAY 13 APRIL IS84.
The meeting will be held In the Cockcrott Theatre on New
Museum Site, Downing Street, Cambridge. It will include
lectures by
Professor Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkln
Dr Aaron Klug
Dr Max Perutz
Professor David Phillips
Lectures will begin at 11.00 a.m. and finish at approximately
5.00 p.m. The registration fee, which includes lunch at
Emmanuel College, will be tS (t3 for students). There will
be an evening dinner after the meeting.
P RO GRAM M E
11.00
Dr Aaron Klug
HRC Laboratory Cambridge
WATER, VIROSES AND BERNAL
Chair:
12.15
onwards
2.IS
Accommodation for a limited number will be available at

Emmanuel College which Is five minutes walk from the Cockcroft
Theatre.
Buffet lunch
Emmanuel College
Professor Dorothy Hodgkin
university of Oxford
ORIGINAL EXPERIMENTS AND EARLY EXPERIENCES
WITH X RAY DIFFRACTION
Chair:
Those wishing to cone to the meeting should fill In the form

below and return it as soon as possible to either
Dr Guy Dodson
Department of Chemistry
University of Tork
Hesllngton
York YO1 5DD
Dr Cyrus Chothia
Laboratory of Molecular
Biology
Bills Road
Cambridge CB2 2QH
3. 30
Short break
3.45
Dr Max Perutz
MRC Laboratory, Cambridge
TBE BAD OLD TIMES REVISITED
Chair:
UGtSTKATIOH ( IS or
13 for students)
This includes lunch.
MUE ( 112)
NAME: ..
ADDKISS:
FH0NE HUHBEI:
I ancloaa a chtqua for E
ACCOW DATION:
( bed/ breakfast)
12 April ( 112)
IJ April ( I I I )
TOTAL
Dr Alan McKay
Blrkbeck College
Dr Fred Snger
MRC Laboratory
Cambridge
Dr Herman Vatson
University of Bristol
Conclusion:
Dr Richard Henderson
MRC Laboratory, Cambridge
5.00
approx
Meeting ends
Tha neting la being held under tha ausplcee of the Britiab
CrjataUotrafhlc association. Tha organisera ara grateful
for. contributions fro tha MRC and the Vellcoae Trust.
Appendix 1. 50th Anniversary of the first X ray protein photographinvitation and programme
Z
Z
>
351
Appendix 2. The celebrated discovery as announced in Nature in 1934
URE
MAV 2R. IK
, in) ttw mowwiitum nf tlm T-ry H . IN
nnliin')*
li1)
-hlivily [loo. rimilnr in form I *
itte
and r 1 )" velocity i>r itft.

l
t m fuurwl () tlMi H vrWitk- Uuw rHbiib.1,4
were vrrr iwiwh tii|[iM>r t t * n thru- of aity knnwt,
neittran. However, if (fr) U a~m.-.l that I I .
Ininlegrntiona eom*pMMl 10 Fig. Ifc, tlint m, 11.
imilrati in (Iml *eallered nntl then (rivea n IwMii-Kn..
linn Itjr capture, tlw neutron veWiiiea fur l i v M _
tlinMilrcTwUoM nro not n'y of (IN* rigid nb-r i f
imacuilude, but olaoUteriiatrilmt imnirwwfinh14.4
Miiiiilirr if event* gainai velocity of Ha- mttin., i,
llw M i m M thai obtained for Ihn difiiiitni*wliwM
earned by neutron directly 'mm U M " W W ,
Titiw I I M evidence m m to indk-ate llwt ( I . *
flMintrgration* alao o n u m l with mptum nf in
nnilmn. I t wema rea*onabla to ronrliHlu Uiot Un
ia at prrnmt no evidence irhieh tnni'M I lut I Mr
nucktet h M tnen tHnintefraled by n mm-ntjrfwrolliainn. Obvmualy thin don* At tmve lia* i* .
oefwrtrnce of dtamU gration* of Ilila ly| %
U 'e M i I Utank Pn>r. A. V. IA,UH Tr WU
co operation.
WlLLlAM I). 1U I*.
DAVin M . H AK * .
l'nivcmity of Chicago,
f .ieiigo. I I I .
M arch .
riaWvMMriOMMv.tliTnB.Ut.ll.lrfrlt.lM.
M* . ri.tnl./ >w. tor.M .A.lM.**: ll*>.
. * . * . A. tM. TM ; INI.
K r t t UMT H I M , r*0. Hi*.. . : I
X Rjy Phoiot nphi of Crysiallint Pepsin
FO VK
wceka ago. D r . 0 . M illikan limuvJi
M
ll*
laiwratoey ot PrOT. j. Tie o ved be rg. l'ltlwaia i ney **

in Ihe form of perfect hexagonal bi| >yramiibt u
"
'
*
h, of axial ratio r/ t 1 3
in their mother lii n>r, '
p r ^f
iugent ami pmitively itn
m f i " " l inUrfereiiee flgitrr. On *"* * I a* .
1*owrvi*r, the birefringence raplly dimmM*". X r"jr
piwlnirmplHi taken of U M eryntalii in Ute M M I **
altewnl nothing but * vagwi black ruin*.
T*""
mlicMiea enrnpfcte alteration of lit err"!"' ""^
rx*>lnina why prevmuti worker* havo htaimil **"
tive r m i l t * with prolwn. M far an eryUilline P"' 1rf "
ia mncnneU 1 . W . T . AM miry lioa, however. *
that lite altered ppp*m i* a protein nf Im* eltain il 1 **
like niyoûi or keratin giving an a u a u pi J J in *
iot t e ni.
.
r "
Ir win rk arly neccmnry to arad hllemlion " ' '

erystal, ami thia W M rflected hy drnwing tlf"* *"
Uieir motlier liquor ami "ilium* expoaure m " "_.
Ihm eflnillnry tuben or Lindrmann RIOM.
"^^zl
pltotograph Uken In thm wny ahnwed tlml *"~
dealing with an nnaltered eryxUl. "
nhotographtwifheoppar/ Ca. n<liation. tlM >i1 ii" r 7 .
Or t i i U i t M U W round u> b . t T b A;
194 A OMTPct to about 5 per cent. Th "V,

minimum valtw u UM apoU on Uw re th** " ^
MAY 28, 1934
795
NATURE
_.
ircmetit and 1 1 M e M i I
bnftii ** Hnrived from tite axml ratio. Tha dimension
^rihe c^l> nia r till br multiplni f t hh. Umg t h *
jrnnjiy moM iirad on f n> li nM Utrinl* 1 31 (mir
Ipamircmcnta fP'* > ) >' > *" nwt mdnr weight
L, 47,nott, which la twrh o l i n 40.0(10, Imoat
rttteHy Svnlberg' vahm arrivttl ( bya nlimrnla lion
b, ihn ultmeentrirugc. Tt ii* agn ctnfnt may iM wrt rr
fc, miitn rortuittHM a* wn liat n TOIUMI that ths trynUU
mttam nuovi Opw cent of water mnovanla a t room
umprmlnra. Dut tiiia wnnhl M ill lead to largn
nlrntlnr w*4glt(, wit h ( nwilily fewpr niotrcido in
, tr unit w l l .
Kot only do t hnn nww< iirrmrfitR rondrm mich
tt* W molcciilar weight Ixit llwy al>*o give
, JP M ifonnalkm * ) I llw nnturo of tlto protein
olenik a a mi will errtainly givo inueh moro when
U analyai* to ptwlted ftirtlKT. From llw in Ut ilit y
rf the pola near tlto ecu In, we nn infer UM t tlto
MOtein molceitlea are relatively denao globular
Lwlira, perhapi Joined togetltcr by valeney bridgei,
twt in any event acpnratcd by relatively largo
M t e a which contain water. From tho mteiM ity of
Iht mnro distant apoU, it ean bo tnfcrred Uint lite
rrauiti ment of atonw imitlo tho protein moleeuk'
M al> or a perfrctly uVCInit kind, although without
the periodicities clM racteriing llw f ibmt * proUiin.
The nbaenrationa a m compatible wit h ablate
wiheraidal molecule* of diameter about tS A, and
35 A., arranged in hexngutial net, which art* relnted
I r*< h other by e. hcxiiRonal cujw axto. Wit h thi
HKMIPI we may imagine legi neration lo take place
UH> linking up or amino eckl renn lue m Mteh
reukii to form el in in* M in Uto ring clmiit poly
tnrrMMtion of polyoxj* methylenei. Pcntido chana
ia DM* ordinary aente may exiat only in Uw more
aifhly condenwd or IIIITOIM prouina, whilo tlw
atob-ruli of Uto primary io1ii1,lc protein* may have
Iheir const i tuen I partn gmupitl nioro pymmcUically
irouiwl prosthelra niiclcu*.
At Him a tage, auch nleaa am ntercly Rpeeulative.
hut now Uiat a cryiriallino protvin haft been made to
|K-e X-rny photogmplia, it r* tletir that wn havn the
mean* of cheeking Utiin and. lay examining tlio
Mmcturo of all cryalailino proleini, arriving at fnr
tore deUifcd eoncliuiion* about protein trueLure
than pmvioiM phj-iat or cliemical motlwKin have
("ft Milk) tO givo.
j 1J. JtiturtAi,.
tr i*
<n- I'mr. J . I I . N-iHhm|>, ti
hernit^n l.ltcy Itow fcAturc* wlneh wo hn,V9 li-arnt
Veitlllv to aMnemle with 11M* lil.tmrn protehia1 t e\-rn
tlnr to iliomt |*rmluci^l 1J\ i.utny irvriirt in mmlom

a>ut 11 SA. ml 4 It A . t ..nl.r.r.ry Immtilily, i-..rr.Iktiwliitg lo the -Ir-etirtiii.-!!!' and tlto 'mtr-lclHuttTafliW*. r-ppertively, n t i m i
It wai flimeull, of count, to reconcil* mich Rndiit

wilh e it r m a l morplioblry ami Uw I A W or R* lwnnl
Imliee, btit t lw photoffntntM or lternal M id M im
Crowfoot, take n before tin* degeneration which we
now ee.tbf* en M ain miM t hat undergone on dr? iit(.
clear up Ihia long atatMling problem atone. Further
mon, tlteir pltoiogra| >lM tend to confirm the uffnt.
lion* that the num lir n X, 3 , 4, anil 6 occurring in
8ve*lherg'a multi lo pnrtklo woigVit ro fundament
ally of triptattofmphn mi PtidatM * . o w n UwtiltS
tlteir coneltHion* to dale appear lo bo against tlto
rhum mcclianMtn pmpoaed for Uw buikling up or tho
varioiM cryfttallogrnphie groupa*.
Wo a m W t now with I ho | mrailox thut tho rwpiun
1
inolrcula hi both globular and aloo a real, or potential.
nol)i>rptida chain aytom. and Urn immediate quNt ion
M w h e t W Uio chana nm form! by metamorphoHm
and Iriikiug-up or Uw globular molecule*, or whetlter
tite initial unit la U M chain itaolf. which k afterward*
lohluu in lontf neat man nor which la merelv an
elaboration or llw mUm-molecular folding that hw
been obaorved in tho keratin tranaformation1, Whnt
ia eilhcf an exceedingly valuable clue or el* only
ftmtaittfe eoineid<?noa M found in Une fibre tiotofraph
of Teat lier krra t m '. a * ttnly or which will be published
alioHly | for if. a Umal Utinki, Uifl pep tin molemlei
are piled, perliap in a K P J * , along lite haxMd a xi* .
their length m thia direction M HO/ 0, t ha t , about
| A., whk h i akiMMt esuetly Ute t t rongnt period
along lite fibre axn. or fealher keratin, a period which
in agnin repealed probably aix (or a multiple of fttx)
time* before Uw fumlnntental ieriod is eornnM ed I
Tin* tnnermoMl ei| uatorial a>>ot or tlw fcatlter photo,
grn iii a lr*o rorrnt>omla lo a Hide pacing or alwut
33 A. (Utnuijh thia M pmbnhly not tito maximuin
iile opaeing). which again M in aimple relation lo U M
aide dnenKioni or Ute | <riMin imit cell. A* juM eaiil.
It eue reirmhlaneea mny lie only accidental, but w*
cannai a fiord ( o overlook anyUiing in sunti e. riifftcM lt
T H Î , aud i t t * not imnotuibln Umt we have here, un
indication or how very long, bvt ptrivtie. polypent" 1 "
chain can a r iw by tlw degrnoraLion a mi lirtking up
of originally glubular nwlcettlca.
W. T. AsTnmr.
B. LOHAX.
Te slilo Pit y* * lîlwmton ,
JnivcrîLy or LcnU.
T.
i. i: im
W. T^' trutfr""!! iir"l. W.'.rti, .Xiriraii. il. * f lJ. l ^. ' t i. Wm.
C..I r JM K>r v . , A. m IM ; ID a. w. T. AiitT **H * n.
AIM. M n . IK, at. * !*. t, lu.
W. T. Mtmir < H. J. Wnnlt. .IATUIR, i n . *M, Xaf 1 I 1 '.
J. X. U rwtf* ml ImmHrMU Krihwat-QiinnH. X>lrr.r. i n .
.fi I M . in. i m .
w. T. * * T " T. e. i n v t , m n , I , jot. jtaa. 2T,
Tramitions to Optical Levels in the Arton t

Absorption Spectrum
X-Rjy
T I I R no-en II I fine *tructiiro of X-ray absorption

edge* M eau*eil by Uto possibility of Inwinitmi nf nn
inner electron to Aifftrtnt upper level*), UteM hrvclt
being ntoro or Ir* dmcrclo for thn lowct cnergii and
n|.[uvx.iin(i-lv couliniHiiM fr Ihu liii ltcr o w i . I n
tin* onlimtrv ^ r t t y niEimi. IIK IIIHT structure ol^*-rv*.*il
with eri-Hlalline aMirlx-M imnilly extcun over iitwra
limn |tKJ v. from Ute mniit eclg>.a. It V I M point'.! out
V Knmig 1 tlml in Uli* ea*c (IHI IIMCTVIO tharnci'-'r of
tit u-ipr-r utAlc* iiMv be ciMuwleTnL u >C to U M
W H W i'lHinKCt<^ " lltn motion 01 a fn*9 electr**n tn
PNINA ABIR-AM
352
Appendix 3. Stages in the resolution of TMV structure
Fit. 2. The disk viewed from above at successive

stages of resolution. From the centre outward there
follow ( i ) t rotationallv f i l t e r e d electronmicroscope image at about 25 A resolution (72); ( i i )
a slice through the 5- electron-density map of the
disk obtained by X-ray analysis, showing rod-like
ot-helices (26) and, ( i i i ) part of the atomic model
bult from the 2.8-A map (Bloomer et a l . , rf. 15).
Appendix 4. Stages in the resolution of insulin structure
nout I.
Pitlerson projections. Pry, for (a) wet insulin and (ft) air-dried insulin, showing similarity or
Ihe vector distributions within 25 A of Ihe origin (the peaks are at distances of roughly 10 and
22 A from the origin); (c) section in the Pollerson distribution, Pxyo,calculated Tor w t l insulin.
The strong inner peak is at 5 A from Ihe origin.
353
354
Appendix 5. Stages in the resolution of haemoglobin structure
X-Rny Structure Analysis: 1913-68.

The molecular structure of haemoglobin, as determined hy M . l \ I'criiU. nnil
his colleagues, compnrcd with lite unit-cell of rock snll (inset) lo the
same scale.

Abir Am Pnina 1992 - A Historical Ethnography of A Scientific Anniversary

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Department of History of Science, Medicine and

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SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY, 1 9 9 2 , VOL. 6, NO. 4 , 3 2 3 - 3 5 4

A historical ethnography of a scientific

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1. Introduction. Where history and ethnography meet: The scientific anniversary as

Scientific anniversaries of great scientists, scientific discoveries, or other scientific

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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2. From paraethnographic history of science to historical ethnography of a scientific

Scientific anniversaries came to my attention as valuable units of historical, and later

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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This was what I thought in my excitement at having finally found an observational

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

3. Process and structure in a scientific anniversary: The fiftieth anniversary of the

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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3.1. Constructing historical authenticity in a scientific anniversary

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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4. Conclusion. The epistemological complementarity of historical authenticity and

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

of its complex epistemological status as an interdisciplinary research object. Some

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY

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a nouncaa a M eting Co ark tha

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S Oth ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST X RAT PROTEIN PHOTOGRAPH

Cockcroft Theatre, New Museum S i t e ,

The first X ray diffraction pattern of a globular protein

Accommodation for a limited number will be available at

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A HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF A SCIENTIFIC ANNIVERSARY