Phosphorus-32 in the Phage Group: radioisotopes as historical tracers of molecular biology

Abstract

The recent historiography of molecular biology features key technologies, instruments and materials, which offer a different view of the field and its turning points than preceding intellectual and institutional histories. Radioisotopes, in this vein, became essential tools in postwar life science research, including molecular biology, and are here analyzed through their use in experiments on bacteriophage. Isotopes were especially well suited for studying the dynamics of chemical transformation over time, through metabolic pathways or life cycles. Scientists labeled phage with phosphorus-32 in order to trace the transfer of genetic material between parent and progeny in virus reproduction. Initial studies of this type did not resolve the mechanism of generational transfer but unexpectedly gave rise to a new style of molecular radiobiology based on the inactivation of phage by the radioactive decay of incorporated phosphorus-32. These ‘suicide experiments’, a preoccupation of phage researchers in the mid-1950s, reveal how molecular biologists interacted with the traditions and practices of radiation geneticists as well as those of biochemists as they were seeking to demarcate a new field. The routine use of radiolabels to visualize nucleic acids emerged as an enduring feature of molecular biological experimentation.

Methods in food science and technology. Part 1

“…This single-stranded nucleic acid segment labeled with radioisotopes or other non-radioisotope techniques acts as a molecular probe. Radioisotope labeling consists in inserting 32 P or 35 S radioisotope in place of non-radioactive phosphorus atoms [Creager 2009]. After hybridization, autoradiography is used, which enables the detection of signals.…”

The Bermuda Triangle: The Pragmatics, Policies, and Principles for Data Sharing in the History of the Human Genome Project

“…A second event involving Watson, data sharing, and the worm took place at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on Long Island. CSHL had been home to Max Delbrück's phage group after the Second World War (Summers 1993;Creager 2009Creager , 2010, and in the late 1980s played an integral role in the origins of the HGP. The laboratory had just hosted the 1986 Molecular Biology of Homo sapiens symposium, at which Walter Gilbert of Harvard famously slapped a $3 billion anticipated price tag on the human genome sequence, an audacious goal at a cost that afflicted nearly all in attendance with sticker shock (Cook-Deegan 1994, pp.…”

The Life of Movement: From Microcinematography to Live-Cell Imaging

“…Live-cell imaging is not solely responsible for these shifts. It is through many 'new technologies of visualization that life has been made amenable to thought at the molecular level, as a set of intelligible vital mechanisms among molecular entities', which range widely from the X-ray crystallography through which the first three-dimensional representation of the atomic structure of organic molecules were produced to the development of radioactive tracers to follow biological molecules through living cells, bodies and ecosystems (Creager, 2009;Dumit, 2004;Myers, 2008;Rose, 2007: 14). Live-cell imaging, however, is the most dynamic of these modes of molecular visualization, the most rooted in the time and space of the cell or tissue.…”