Introduction

The life sciences in the United States underwent major transformations during the first half of the twentieth century. That period saw the emergence of new disciplines and research schools, the rise of institutions, and the ascent of scientific leaders and powerful administrators. The coalescence of these intellectual and social trends propelled the United States from the periphery to the vanguard of biological research. While at the turn of the century students of the life sciences still traveled to Europe for their doctoral or post-doctoral education (mainly to Germany), by mid-century the nation's scientific institutions had become training grounds not only for new generations of Americans, but also for European students of the life sciences. The Library of the American Philosophical Society houses manuscript sources documenting important aspects of these intellectual and institutional developments. Over sixty collections at the Library deal directly with biological research in America in the twentieth century; with the exception of a handful of records of scientific societies and institutions, most of these collections are the personal papers of prominent researchers in various disciplines of the life sciences.

Scope of the Guide

This bibliographic guide to twenty-four manuscript collections is arranged around the disciplines of physiology, biochemistry, and biophysics. This organization of knowledge reflects that of the scientists, who generally identify themselves professionally in disciplinary terms. They frequently work in departments which reflect their disciplinary affiliation, belong to closely allied scientific societies, and tend to define the scope of their investigations within disciplinary boundaries. But while these broad fields-physiology, biochemistry, and biophysics-encompass the research and activities of the scientists described in this guide, they are necessarily oversimplified and somewhat arbitrary. Mapping the scientific landscape along disciplinary contours tends to ignore the richness, complexities, and fluidity of the life sciences.

Frequently, the boundaries which separate physiology, biochemistry, and biophysics are not only blurred, but also overlap with other fields such as botany, genetics, cytology, pathology, microbiology, immunology, and molecular biology. The research of biochemist Florence Siebert at the Phipps Institute in Philadelphia, for example, represents an overlap of biochemistry, bacteriology, and immunology. Francis J. W. Roughton's studies of hemoglobin and respiration at the Department of Colloid Sciences at Cambridge University and at the University of Pennsylvania fall within the domains of biochemistry, biophysics, and physiology. The quantitative investigations on plant cell membranes of Winthrop J. V. Osterhout of the Rockefeller Institute are as much a part of general physiology as of botany and biophysics; and Peyton Rous's work at the Institute on tumor viruses has been variously described as virology, microbiology, pathology, and physiology.

The decision to limit the annotations to physiology, biochemistry, and biophysics is arbitrary in yet another respect. Two major areas in the life sciences -- medicine and genetics -- have been deliberately left out. The exclusion of genetics is readily justified since an annotated bibliography of manuscript sources in genetics at the APS has recently been completed by H. Bentley Glass. Even in this instance it has been difficult to avoid an overlap. With the rise of molecular biology in the late 1930s, several geneticists began to focus their investigations on the physico-chemical nature of the gene, and research in genetics, microbiology, and biochemistry began to merge. The papers of geneticists Jsack Schultz and Milislav Demerec, and those of biochemist Erwin Chargaff and virologist Peyton Rous reflect fundamental issues in physiological and biochemical genetics. These materials help document the early transition from classical genetics to molecular biology.

The exclusion of medicine has been more problematic. Some of the most fundamental studies in physiology, biochemistry, and biophysics have been conducted in medical institutions. William Mansfield Clark's investigations in physical biochemistry were carried out at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which has always fostered freedom of scientific inquiry, stimulated basic investigations in biochemistry, biophysics, and physiology that were only tangentially related to medical practice; the manuscript sources at the APS on Max Bergmann, Phoebus A.T. Levene, Winthrop J.V. Osterhout, and John H. Northrop exemplify this point. In fact, it would be difficult to name a single research problem in the life sciences that does not bear relevance to medicine. And indeed, most of the scientists in this guide have delivered Harvey Lectures at the New York Academy of Medicine.

What does link the scientists whose papers are covered in this annotated guide is their primary commitment to fundamental laboratory research in the life sciences. Their contributions to our understanding of normal and abnormal biological processes have been made by and large through research on the most basic level of cells and molecules. Taken together, these scientists represent some of the principal actors who have shaped the course of the life sciences in the United States in the twentieth century.

Format of the Guide

The annotated entries fall into two categories: Primary and Secondary. The Primary Group consists of twenty-four actual APS collections-twenty-two are the personal papers of life scientists, one collection (Cold Spring Harbor) contains institutional papers, and one collection (Anne Roe) consists of interviews. The Secondary Group consists of manuscript sources on twenty one scientists whose personal papers are not at the Library, but on whom there are significant records in APS manuscript collections of other scientists (mainly scientists in the Primary Group). The criteria for "significant records" are based mainly on the quantity of material, although in some cases the importance of a small number of documents, in the judgment of the author, has merited separate entries. In fact, one purpose for creating the secondary group of entries is to call attention to significant sources which otherwise might be overlooked.

Throughout the bibliography, the primary entries (actual manuscript collections at APS) are designated with a ", while secondary entries (other APS manuscript sources) are designated with a **. For example, W. J. Robbins* refers to the Robbins Papers at the APS Library which are described in the Primary Group section; J.H. Northrop** refers to the materials on Northrop in various APS manuscript collections which are described under Northrop's name in the Secondary Group.

This notation system is also employed in the survey below. This historical overview places the manuscript sources within broad intellectual, institutional, and social contexts; the star system of notation highlights the links between members of the Secondary and Primary groups, as well as the relations of the life scientists to their wider milieu. The survey is appended with suggested research topics -- seven areas that stand out as potentially fruitful studies based on the annotated manuscript sources. These suggestions are by no means exhaustive but are merely intended as starting points for future scholarship in selected areas in the history of twentieth-century American science.