The Contributions-and Collapse-of Lamarckism in Pasteurian Molecular Biology: 2. Enzymatic Adaptation, 1920-1965.

Abstract

This article is the second part of an elucidation of the complex relationship between Lamarckism (broadly speaking) and the rise of the French school of molecular biology at the Pasteur Institute. In the first part, Jean Gayon, Richard Burian and this author (2017) showed how the characterization of the bacteriophage's development cycle was first theorized on the basis of several Lamarckian conceptions of the inheritance of acquired characters, before it came to be understood in strictly molecular and genetic terms by André Lwoff and then François Jacob after the Second World War. This article focuses on the second line of research that led to the lactose operon model, that of enzymatic adaptation. This history does not show the exact same pattern: this time, the issue of Lamarckian heredity played a less important (yet still significant) role. To a greater extent, the question of finality and finalism was the main concern of the work of Jacques Monod, Melvin Cohn and their collaborators. This article examines how Monod took up the challenge of a Lamarckian finalism that was typical of French interwar biology and how, at the end of the 1950s, he had to radically rethink the place of finality in the characterization of molecular structures. This article also reconstructs the theoretical and experimental context in which the concept of "cellular memory" originated, a concept that could easily have fit with Lamarckian interpretations. Thus, in the field of enzymatic adaptation too, certain aspects of Lamarckism played a key role as a challenge for the nascent molecular biology.