Present-day public attitudes to biological manipulation are ambivalent, many surveys show. This paper explores evidence of earlier attitudes to experimental biology, before survey data exists, by examining published responses in the press to the idea that biologists would `create life'. This remarkable claim achieved wide currency in the early years of this century, particularly linked to the work of two prototypical `visible scientists': Jacques Loeb and Alexis Carrel. Analysis of press responses to accounts of their work reveals deep disquiet about its possible implications, at a time when science and technology in general were regarded very positively. The evidence is augmented by studying commentary on a Presidential Address by Edward Schafer to the British Association meeting of 1912. It is concluded that feelings of ambivalence toward the manipulative power of biology are apparent at a very early stage in the development of modern biology, and that this makes it implausible that more recent manifestations of such ambivalence can be ascribed to some generalized `anti-science' sentiment which has gathered strength in recent years.
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References
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A prominent biologist who argues in similar vein is the Harvard bacteriologist Bernard Davis. See Chapter 1 of Davis, B. D., 1991, The Genetic Revolution—Scientific Prospects and Public Perceptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
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Full details are in Pauly's illuminating biography: Pauly, P. J., 1987, Controlling Life—Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology (New York: Oxford University Press).
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Jane Maienschein recounts the intimate relations between these three and a fourth leading American biologist, E. G. Conklin, in Maienschein, J., 1991, Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880-1915 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
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Anon ., 1911, Life still hides its secret. New York Times, editorial, 9 August.
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Tobey, R. , 1971, The American Ideology of National Science (University of Pittsburgh Press), p. 64. Note, though, that Pauly quotes Wilson writing in the International Monthly in 1900 that Loeb's experiments opened up possibilities for `creating wholly new organic forms by varying slightly the conditions of development'.
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This and other quotations are taken from items in the files of the Rockefeller University Library, New York, formerly the Rockefeller Institute. They are denoted subsequently thus: (Rockefeller Collection). New York Times, 26 October 1912 (Rockefeller Collection).
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53.
The Light, San Antonio, Texas, 17 November 1912 (Rockefeller Collection).
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