The influence of Niels Bohr on Max Delbrück: Revisiting the hopes inspired by "light and life"

ISIS

Volumn 96, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 507-529

  McKaughan, Daniel J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; LIFE; MOLECULAR BIOLOGY; NUCLEAR PHYSICS; QUANTUM THEORY;

HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; LIFE; MOLECULAR BIOLOGY; NUCLEAR PHYSICS; QUANTUM THEORY;

EID: 33645780467     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/498591     Document Type: Review

References (135)

1. Niels Bohr, "Light and Life," Nature, 25 Mar. 1933, 133:421-423 (Pt. 1)
2. Niels Bohr, Nature, 1933, 133:457-459 (Pt. 2), 1 Apr.
3. (subsequent citations will be to this version of his essay unless otherwise indicated); the Nature translation is reprinted in The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 2: Essays, 1932-1957, on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Woodbridge: Ox Bow, 1987), pp. 4-12.
4. For the German version see Bohr, "Licht und Leben," Natuwissenschaften, 1933, 21:245-250. The published English and German versions were translated with some "formal alterations" from the Danish version published in the report of the congress.
5. Two descriptions are complementary if and only if they require mutually exclusive experimental arrangements but are jointly necessary for our understanding of the phenomena. See Don Howard, "Who Invented the Copenhagen Interpretation? A Study in Mythology," in PSA 2002, Pt. 2: Symposium Papers: Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 7-9, 2002, special issue of Philosophy of Science, Dec. 2004, 71:669-682;
6. Dugald Murdoch, Niels Bohr's Philosophy of Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987);
7. and Mara Beller, "The Birth of Bohr's Complementarity: The Context and the Dialogues," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1992, 23:147-180.
8. Carolyn Hording, interview with Max Delbüick, 14 July-11 Sept. 1978, Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, California (available online at http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/16/ or at http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Delbruck_M).
9. See also Ernst Peter Fisher and Carol Lipson, Thinking about Science: Max Delbrück and the Origins of Molecular Biology (New York: Norton, 1988)
10. (hereafter cited as Fisher and Lipson, Thinking about Science) .
11. Max Delbrück, "Light and Life III," Carlsberg Research Communications, 1976, 41(6):299-309, on p. 299 (this lecture was given at the Centennial of the Carlsberg Laboratory, Copenhagen, 27 Sept. 1976);
12. and Delbrück, "A Physicist Looks at Biology," Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1949, 38:173-190,
13. rpt. in Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, ed. John Cairns, Gunther S. Stent, and James Watson (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory of Quantitative Biology, 1966), pp. 9-22, on p. 22
14. (italics added) (subsequent citations will be to the reprinted version; it will be shown as Delbrück, "Physicist Looks at Biology"). Similarly, in 1963, pointing to a passage from "Light and Life," Delbrück said, "This is the passage which [Bohr] . . . worried about ever after very much, and the reason that I am standing here today, is that I am perhaps the only one of his associates of those days who took this passage so seriously that it determined his career, changing over into biology to find out whether indeed there was anything to this point of view": Delbrück, "Biophysics," in Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Niels Bohr's First Papers on Atomic Constitution, Held in Copenhagen on 8-15 July 1963 (Copenhagen: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Univ. Copenhagen, 1963), pp. 41-67, on p. 43. This talk was delivered at a session entitled "Cosmos and Life" held on 12 July 1963; the published version includes the discussion that followed.
15. I shall focus primarily on the traditional interpretation as it appears in the following, which are representative of the relevant literature: Gunther S. Stent, "Introduction: Waiting for the Paradox," in Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, ed. Cairns et al., pp. 3-8;
16. Stent, "Light and Life: Niels Bohr's Legacy to Contemporary Biology," Genome, 1989, 31:11-15;
17. Stent, "Looking for Other Laws of Physics," Journal of Contemporary History; 1998, 33:371-397;
18. Lily E. Kay, "Conceptual Models and Analytical Tools: The Biology of the Physicist Max Delbrück," Social Research, 1984, pp. 641-673,
19. rpt. in Journal of the History of Biology, 1985, 18:207-246 (subsequent citations will be to this source);
20. Kay, "The Secret of Life: Niels Bohr's Influence on the Biology Program of Max Delbrück," Revista di Storia della Scienze, 1985, 2:487-510;
21. Nils Roll-Hansen, "The Application of Complementarity to Biology: From Niels Bohr to Max Delbrück," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 2000, 30:417-442
22. (hereafter cited as Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology");
23. and Fisher and Lipson, Thinking about Science.
24. Nikolai W. Timoféeff-Ressovsky, Karl G. Zimmer, and Max Delbrück, "Über die Natur der Genmutation und der Genstruktur," Nachrichten von der Gessellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen: Mathematisch-Physische Klasse, 1935, 6(13):190-245.
25. The English title of this paper is "The Nature of Genetic Mutations and the Structure of the Gene"; I have consulted the recent complete translation of this paper by Brandon Fogel and Phillip Sloan (personal communication), and subsequent references will be to their translation.
26. Hazel Muir et al., "Max Delbrück," in Larousse Dictionary of Scientists (Edinburgh: Larousse, 1994), p. 139 (emphasis added).
27. Schrödinger's lectures were delivered at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College in February 1943 and first published as What Is Life? in 1944. On the role of "Light and Life" in Delbrück's decision to move into biology see Fisher and Lipson, Thinking about Science;
28. Kay, "Conceptual Models and Analytical Tools" (cit. n. 5);
29. Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology";
30. Stent, "Introduction: Waiting for the Paradox" (cit. n. 5);
31. and Stent, "Looking for Other Laws of Physics" (cit. n. 5).
32. Stent, "Looking for Other Laws of Physics," pp. 375, 387.
33. See also Stent, "Introduction: Waiting for the Paradox."
34. Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 613.
35. Kay, "Conceptual Models and Analytical Tools" (cit. n. 5), pp. 209-210;
36. Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology," pp. 418 (emphasis added), 425;
37. and Fisher and Lipson, Thinking about Science, p. 90.
38. E.g., Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1982)
39. (Lenoir does not focus specifically on associations with Bohr, but his work brought attention to the notion of a nineteenth-century "teleo-mechanical" tradition in the early 1980s); Henry J. Folse, The Philosophy of Niels Bohr: The Framework of Complementarity (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985);
40. Folse, "Complementarity and the Description of Nature in Biological Science," Biology and Philosophy, 1990, 5:221-224;
41. Jan Faye, "The Bohr-Høffding Relationship Reconsidered," Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.. 1988, 19:321-346;
42. Faye, Niels Bohr: His Heritage and Legacy: An Anti-Realist View of Quantum Mechanics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991);
43. Faye, "Once More: Bohr-Høffding," Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, 1994, 29:106-113;
44. David Favrholdt, Niels Bohr's Philosophical Background (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1992);
45. Faye and Folse, eds., Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994);
46. Catherine Chevalley, "Niels Bohr's Words and the Atlantis of Kantianism," Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy ibid., pp. 33-55;
47. and Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology."
48. Faye, Niels Bohr;
49. and Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology."
50. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
51. For detailed discussions of these issues see Peter McLaughlin, Kant's Critique of Teleology in Biological Explanation: Antinomy and Teleology (Studies in the History of Philosophy) (New York: Mellen, 1990);
52. Daniel Kolb, "The Systematic Unity of Kant's Idea of Nature" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. Notre Dame, 1983);
53. and Kolb, "Kant, Teleology, and Evolution," Synthese, 1992, 91(1-2):9-28.
54. Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology," pp. 417, 420 (on Haldane).
55. On Høffding's role see Faye, "Bohr-Høffding Relationship Reconsidered" (cit. n. 11);
56. Faye, Niels Bohr (cit. n. 11);
57. Faye, "Once More: Bohr-Høffding" (cit. n. 11);
58. and Folse, Philosophy of Niels Bohr (cit. n. 11).
59. Lenoir, Strategy of Life (cit. n. 11);
60. and Niels Bohr, "Physical Science and the Problem of Life" (1957),
61. rpt. in Essays, 1932-1957, on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (cit. n. 1), pp. 94-101, on pp. 95-96.
62. On Niels's and Harald's attendance at meetings of the discussion circle see David Favrholdt, "Remarks on the Bohr-Høffding Relationship," Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 1991, 22:399-414, esp. p. 400.
63. Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology," p. 424 (emphasis added). In his own Kantian reading Roll-Hansen refers to Bohr's view as a "critical teleology" or "epistemological anti-reductionism." I prefer the label "teleo-mechanical complementarity" because it explicitly highlights Bohr's envisioned complementarity between teleological and mechanistic descriptions.
64. Bohr, "Light and Life" (cit. n. 1), pp. 457a, 421a.
65. See also Niels Bohr, "Light and Life Revisited," dedication for the Institute of Genetics (1962), in The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 3: Essays, 1958-1962, on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Woodbridge: Ox Bow, 1963), pp. 23-29, on p. 24.
66. Bohr, "Light and Life," p. 458a;
67. see also Bohr, "Light and Life Revisited," p. 26.
68. Niels Bohr, "Seventh International Congress of Radiology" (1954), in The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 4: Causality and Complementarity: Supplementary Papers, ed. Jan Faye and Henry J. Folse (Woodbridge: Ox Bow, 1998), pp. 161-163, on p. 163;
69. and Bohr, "Physical Science and the Problem of Life" (cit. n. 15), pp. 96-97.
70. Niels Bohr, "On the Notions of Causality and Complementarity" (1948), in Causality and Complementarity, pp. 141-148, on p. 147;
71. Bohr, "Light and Life" (cit. n. 1), p. 458b;
72. and Bohr, "Medical Research and Natural Philosophy" (1951), in Causality and Complementarity, pp. 149-154, on p. 153. As Bohr sees it, traditional vitalism (in, say, its postulation of a life force or "occult qualities") tends to drift into obscurantism and mysticism, while the mechanical conception of nature excludes our experience of purposive behavior. Bohr seeks an epistemological resolution to the problem.
73. Bohr, "Light and Life," p. 458a-b.
74. See also Bohr, "Light and Life Revisited" (cit. n. 17), p. 26;
75. and Bohr, "Medical Research and Natural Philosophy," p. 153.
76. Bohr, "Light and Life," p. 458b.
77. Bohr, "Light and Life," Ibid., p. 458a (emphasis added).
78. Niels Bohr, "The Connection between the Sciences" (1960), in Essays, 1958-1962, on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (cit. n. 17), pp. 17-22, on p. 21.
79. One also finds this ambiguity between practical or principled epistemological reasons in Bohr, "Light and Life Revisited" (cit. n. 17), p. 26:
80. "Surely, as long as for practical or epistemological reasons one speaks of life, such teleological terms will be used in complementing the terminology of molecular biology. This circumstance, however, does not in itself imply any limitation in the application to biology of the well-established principles of atomic physics." Delbrück seems to have focused on Bohr's suggestion in the original "Light and Life" lecture that one principled reason that there are limits to a mechanistic description of life might be the fact that "we should doubtless kill an animal if we tried to carry the investigation of its organs so far that we could describe the role played by single atoms in vital functions": Bohr, "Light and Life," p. 458a.
81. Delbrück specifically returned to this passage in "Biophysics" (cit. n. 4), in "Light and Life III" (cit. n. 4), and in Mind From Matter? An Essay on Evolutionary Epistemology (Palo Alto, Calif.: Blackwell Scientific, 1986).
82. He noted that, in "Light and Life Revisited," Bohr attempted to clarify (and to some extent qualify) his earlier view. Taking the opportunity to reexamine his original position in light of the growth of the field of molecular biology, Bohr pointed out in that 1962 talk that "the task of biology cannot be that of accounting for the fate of each of the innumerable atoms permanently or temporarily included in a living organism": Bohr, "Light and Life Revisited," p. 26.
83. Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology," p. 424 (emphasis added).
84. Delbrück, e.g., takes it for granted that "quantum mechanics is the final word as regards the behavior of atoms and we base this belief upon the analysis by Bohr and Heisenberg": Delbrück, "Physicist Looks at Biology," p. 19 (emphasis added).
85. Niels Bohr, "Introductory Survey" (1929), in The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. 1: Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (Woodbridge: Ox Bow, 1987), pp. 1-24, on p. 22. The Ox Bow edition is a reprint of the Cambridge University Press volume originally published in 1934.
86. Niels Bohr, "Physical Science and Man's Position" (1956), in Causality and Complementarity (cit. n. 19), pp. 170-179, on p. 176 (emphasis added).
87. On the need for biological laws on the teleological side see Bohr, "Light and Light Revisited" (cit. n. 17), p. 26.
88. Bohr, "Light and Life," in Essays, 1932-1957, on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (cit. n. 1), p. 4;
89. Niels Bohr, "The Causality Problem in Physics" (1938), in Causality and Complementarity, pp. 94-121, on p. 108 (emphasis added);
90. and Bohr, "Medical Research and Natural Philosophy" (cit. n. 20), p. 153.
91. Fisher and Lipson, Thinking about Science, pp. 79, 82. Fisher and Lipson are paraphrasing the Delbrück interview here: Harding interview with Delbrück (cit. n. 3), p. 40. Actually, remarks in the 1935 "Three-Man Paper" indicate that Delbrück may have been more aware of the Kantian view than this suggests.
92. This discussion came after Delbrück delivered his paper "Biophysics" (cit. n. 4) at a conference held in Copenhagen in 1963 to commemorate Bohr's first papers on atomic constitution and was printed in the conference proceedings along with the paper; the quotations come from pp. 64, 66, and 67 (emphases added).
93. Max Delbrück to Niels Bohr, 1 Dec. 1954, Bohr Archives, Bohr Institute, Copenhagen; and Delbrück to Bohr, 23 Dec. 1957, Delbrück Papers, Caltech Archive, Pasadena. Both letters are cited in Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology," pp. 434, 437.
94. Timoféeff-Ressovsky et al., "Nature of Genetic Mutations and the Structure of the Gene" (cit. n. 6) (emphasis added);
95. and Delbrück, "Physicist Looks at Biology" pp. 20-21 (emphasis added).
96. Cf. Max Delbrück, "A Physicist's Renewed Look at Biology: Twenty Years Later," Science, 12 June 1970, 168:1312-1315.
97. This is also clear in the Harding interview with Delbrück (cit. n. 3), pp. 40-41: "Bohr then very vigorously asked the question whether this new dialectic wouldn't be important also in other aspects of science. He talked about that a lot, especially in relation to biology, in discussing the relation between life on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other - whether there wasn't an experimental mutual exclusion, so that you could look at a living organism either as a living organism or as a jumble of molecules; you could do either, you could make observations that tell you where the molecules are, or you could make observations that tell you how the animal behaves, but there might well exist a mutually exclusive feature, analogous to the one found in atomic physics."
98. Delbrück to Bohr, 30 Nov. 1935, quoted in Fisher and Lipson, Thinking about Science, p. 85.
99. Delbrück, "Physicist Looks at Biology," pp. 18, 22.
100. Delbrück, "Physicist Looks at Biology," Ibid., p. 22.
101. Kay, "Conceptual Models and Analytical Tools" (cit. n. 5), p. 245 (citing letter to Bohr; emphasis added);
102. Delbrück, "Physicist Looks at Biology," p. 17; and Harding interview with Delbrück (cit. n. 3) (the word "have" is underlined in the text of the interview).
103. See Alexander Rosenberg, The Structure of Biological Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).
104. Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology," p. 418;
105. Kay, "Conceptual Models and Analytical Tools," p. 246;
106. and Timoféeff-Ressovsky et al., "Nature of Genetic Mutations and the Structure of the Gene" (cit. n. 6).
107. Roll-Hansen, "Application of Complementarity to Biology," p. 418.
108. Delbrück, "Physicist Looks at Biology," pp. 10 (emphasis added), 16, 19 (emphasis added).
109. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (1944),
110. was reprinted with Mind and Matter (1958) and "Autobiographical Sketches" (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
111. For discussion of the impact of What Is Life? and its influence in leading a number of trained physicists to transition into biology see esp. Robert Olby, The Path to the Double Helix (London: Macmillan, 1974);
112. Olby, "Schrödinger's Problem: What Is Life?" J. Hist. Biol., 1971, 4:119-148;
113. and Edward J. Yoxen, "Where Does Schroedinger's "What Is Life?" Belong in the History of Molecular Biology?" History of Science, 1979, 17:17-52.
114. Schrödinger and Paul Dirac were co-recipients of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory." The "Three-Man Paper" is Timoféeff-Ressovsky et al., "The Nature of Genetic Mutations and the Structure of the Gene" (cit. n. 6).
115. Here, I am in agreement with Robert Olby and Lenny Moss that Schrödinger did not expect that these new laws would require appeal to a form of complementarity in the life sciences. See Olby, Path to the Double Helix;
116. and Lenny Moss, What Genes Can't Do (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), p. 55.
117. See Schrödinger, What Is Life? (cit. n. 43), pp. 80-85.
118. Moss, What Genes Can't Do, pp. 53-62, provides a lucid discussion of Schrödinger, As he puts it, "Schrödinger forsees the finding of new higher-level laws or principles that explain the ability of living systems to parlay high levels of order between the chemically stable but metabolically inert aperiodic crystal and the growing and metabolizing, but entropically vulnerable, apparatus of the cell and organism" (p. 60).
119. Schrödinger, What Is Life? pp. 80-81 (emphasis added; the capital letters appear in the original text and are used to mark a new section heading), 3, 4 (emphasis added), 76.
120. Schrödinger, What Is Life? Ibid., p. 68 (emphasis added).
121. Stent, "Introduction: Waiting for the Paradox" (cit. n. 5), p. 4 (emphasis added);
122. and Timoféeff-Ressovsky el al., "Nature of Genetic Mutations and the Structure of the Gene" (cit. n. 6).
123. Max Delbrück, "What Is Life? What Is Truth? Quarterly Review of Biology, 1945, 20:370-372, on pp. 370a, 371b, 371a, 372b.
124. Fisher and Lipson, Thinking about Science, p. 84;
125. James D. Watson, "Growing Up in the Phage Group," in Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, ed. Cairns et al. (cit. n. 4), pp. 239-245, on p. 240 (emphasis added);
126. and Stent, "Looking for Other Laws of Physics" (cit. n. 5), p. 387.
127. Stent, "Looking for Other Laws of Physics," pp. 390-391.
128. Stent makes a similar point, but provides less context, in "Introduction: Waiting for the Paradox" (cit. n. 5), p. 7.
129. Fisher and Lipson, Thinking about Science, p. 164.
130. Maurice Wilkins also highlights the importance of What Is Life? in influencing his transition from physics to biology in his 1962 Nobel acceptance address: Maurice F. Wilkins, "The Molecular Configuration of Nucleic Acids," Nobel Lecture, 11 Dec. 1962, in Nobel Lectures: Physiology or Medicine, 1942-1962 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1964).
131. Francis Crick, Salvador Luria, and Seymour Benzer also acknowledge the excitement stirred by What Is Life? as a part of their intellectual development. See Olby, Path to the Double Helix (cit. n. 43), Ch. 15.
132. Stent, "Looking for Other Laws of Physics" (cit. n. 5), p. 372 (emphasis added);
133. see also p. 378, where he again notes that his own reason for studying phage was that he was "hoping that it would lead me to the discovery of other laws of physics." Stent clearly (and, as I have argued, incorrectly) took Bohr to be the "original source for the idea of 'other laws of physics.'" Noting that What Is Life? drew attention to the "Three-Man Paper," he writes: "This paper remained virtually unknown until Schrödinger drew attention to it a decade later in his What is Life? (in which he made no reference to Bohr as the original source of the idea of 'other laws of physics')" (Stent, "Looking for Other Laws of Physics" ibid., p. 375).
134. Stent, "Looking for Other Laws of Physics" Ibid., p. 380;
135. and William Hayes, "Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück, September 4, 1906-March 10, 1981," in Biographical Memoirs (London: Royal Society, 1982), pp. 66-117, on p. 88.