Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Based solely on its originality, wealth of detail, and subject matter,
Crossing the Boundaries of Life deserves to be on the must-read list of every historian of the twentieth-century life sciences.” * Journal of the History of Biology *
"Based on personal contact and archival research, including an epilogue addressing contending epistemic debates (cellular context vs. molecular processes), this book provides an excellent account of how paradigm shifts actually occur in science. The text is readable for a general audience and provides a host of primary resources. . . . Highly recommended." * Choice *
“Those who are willing to be guided through the rough and tumble of a long experimental research trajectory and its details will be richly rewarded in the end. To the reviewer's knowledge, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of what it means to do cell biology at the molecular level, and to trace historically how it came to be done.” -- Hans-Jörg Rheinberger * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (translated from German) *
"This complexity of the cell, and equally—if not more so—the complexity of the history of the scientific study of the cell, is something that struck me most forcibly as I wended my way through the pages of Karl Matlin’s
Crossing the Boundaries of Life. . . . there is a rich vein of information as well as ideas for entire historical projects to be mined in this book." * Metascience *
"Matlin charts new terrain in the history of the life sciences. His book is original, relevant, and provides a wealth of new stories and conceptual problems for the history and philosophy of cell and molecular biology. This exciting piece of scholarship covers a crucial episode of these sciences which merits scholarly attention. Matlin moves the field a step forward." -- Mathias Grote, author of Membranes to Molecular Machines
Table of ContentsPreface
Prologue. A Very Small Difference . . .
Part I. The Cytologist’s Dilemma
1. The Living Substance
2. The Membrane Boundary
3. Breakthroughs
Part II. From Cells to Molecules
4. The Endoplasmic Reticulum
5. The Signal Hypothesis
6. The Strange Case of the Signal Recognition Particle
7. Enemies, Real and Imagined
8. The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Part III. Form Redux
9. Topogenesis and Spatial Information
10. In Vitro Veritas?
11. Form, Context, and the Epistemic Strategy of Cell Biology
Epilogue. 1975 and All That
A Note on Sources
References
