Creating a Physical Biology

The Three-Man Paper and Early Molecular Biology

Sloan Phillip R., Fogel Brandon

In 1935 geneticist Nikolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky, radiation physicist Karl G. Zimmer, and quantum physicist Max Delbruck published "On the Nature of Gene Mutation and Gene Structure", known subsequently as the "Three-Man Paper". This seminal paper advanced work on the physical exploration of the structure of the gene through radiation physics and suggested ways in which physics could reveal definite information about gene structure, mutation, and action. Representing a new level of collaboration between physics and biology, it played an important role in the birth of the new field of molecular biology. The paper's results were popularized for a wide audience in the "What is Life?" lectures of physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1944.

Despite its historical impact on the biological sciences, the paper has remained largely inaccessible because it was only published in a short-lived German periodical".Creating a Physical Biology" makes the Three Man Paper available in English for the first time. Brandon Fogel's translation is accompanied by an introductory essay by Fogel and Phillip Sloan and a set of essays by leading historians and philosophers of biology that explore the context, contents, and subsequent influence of the paper, as well as its importance for the wider philosophical analysis of biological reductionism.

Reviews

"Seventy-six years ago appeared a paper in German about the action of X-rays on the genetic material, written by three authors, hence known as the 'Three-Man Paper'. Here in 'Creating a Physical Biology', for the first time, is an excellent English translation of that paper, and alongside it are five essays evaluating its historical significance and philosophical claims. Why so much fuss about a little-known old paper? Read about it, and enter the scientific world of the physics and biology of the 1930s. Away with the retrospect of subsequent knowledge! Find here the Three-Man Paper's context in 1930s Berlin, the target theory, the 1930s gene, and the relation between physics and biology. A very refreshing reevaluation" – Robert Olby, University of Pittsburgh

"This book should be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the history of molecular biology. The Three-Man Paper is beautiful reading, but it is now known mainly from the presentation of its principal claims in Erwin Schrodinger's 'What Is Life?' (1944), which misrepresented the paper's stance toward reductionism. The interpretive essays collected here review that issue and contribute to an ongoing reappraisal of pre-1940 research that helped shape what became molecular biology long before DNA was recognized as the genetic material or the structure of the double helix reshaped our understanding of biological processes. Perhaps surprisingly, the essays also show that the Three-Man Paper remains relevant to debates on reductionism even today" – Richard M. Burian, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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