Trespassers in the Archives

“What a coincidence, what prodigious developments,” I remember thinking during my orientation session at the Science History Institute last fall, when the acquisition of the History of Molecular Biology Collection was announced to the incoming fellows. For a moment I switched off (my apologies!) and found myself in an imaginary quarrel with the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, one of the chief characters in my dissertation on the history of a postwar social movement against scientific reductionism, who would almost certainly have objected to my use of the word “coincidence.” Koestler, whose works spanned journalism, political novels, and science writing, had little patience for chance. He preferred hidden patterns, and later in life even paranormal explanations—anything that made luck sound intellectually suspect.

Koestler himself is not in the History of Molecular Biology Collection, but some of my other favorite trespassers are, like Leo Szilard and Max Delbrück, both of whom crossed the boundaries between physics and biology.

I have long been fascinated by these highly mobile 20th-century minds: scientists who crossed fields with enviable confidence, occasionally alarming self-assurance, and one suspects, only intermittent awareness of the hazards ahead. Physics into biology, biology into philosophy, technical reasoning into grand conclusions—some people simply could not resist a good intellectual border crossing. From a historian’s point of view, these scientists are irresistible.

What makes the new History of Molecular Biology Collection so exciting (for me) is that it preserves these crossings in action, before posterity came along and tidied them up.

One item that especially caught my attention was a 1960 letter from Delbrück to Szilard, in which Delbrück offers feedback on a draft of Szilard’s new book. On paper, this might sound like a meeting of equals: two brilliant émigré scientists, both famous for moving across disciplinary boundaries, both central in different ways to the intellectual world from which the field of molecular biology emerged. But the charm of the letter lies in the fact that Delbrück does not simply congratulate Szilard on his biological ventures. He corrects him.

And not vaguely. Not ceremonially. He corrects him in detail.

The result is wonderfully human. Delbrück is admiring, but also skeptical; generous, but also unmistakably firm. One can almost feel the energy and hear the tone: “Yes, very interesting, Leo, but that is not quite how this works.” For all the retrospective glamour of interdisciplinary brilliance, the archival record offers a useful reminder that trespassing into another field often meant being told—sometimes patiently, sometimes less patiently—that one had overreached.

That unexpected rap on the knuckles is precisely why the letter is so much fun to read.

Scientific fields often reach us in polished form. Molecular biology too, in hindsight, can appear as a triumphant story populated by visionary figures and decisive breakthroughs. But archival materials have a way of restoring the noise to the signal. They bring back uncertainty, disagreement, hesitation, and the small frictions by which knowledge actually moved. In this case, the friction is especially enjoyable because it occurs between two people who were both, in different senses, intellectual adventurers.

The new collection invites exactly this sort of encounter. It does not simply preserve “important scientists” as finished icons. It preserves their exchanges, their working papers, their half-settled ideas, and their collisions. For a researcher, that is a gift. For a general reader, it offers something even better: the chance to see science as a lived, social, sometimes faintly comic process. Reading these papers feels like watching molecular biology being argued into existence.

There is, after all, something deeply reassuring about discovering that even very famous scientists had to endure the intellectual equivalent of being pulled aside and told, with varying degrees of tact, that they were venturing beyond their depth.

As the first researcher to have consulted parts of this newly opened collection, I felt a special thrill in encountering molecular biology as represented by Szilard and Delbrück, who appear here as thinkers in transit: bold, curious, occasionally exasperating, and fully capable of exasperating each other.

Which is perhaps the nicest thing an archive can do. It can return prestige to scale. It can remind us that behind every grand scientific field were actual people writing actual letters, making actual claims, and sometimes being told, by a trusted peer, to slow down just a little.

Trespassers, in other words, are often most interesting at the very moment they meet a fence.

Featured image at top: A folder containing correspondence between Max Delbrück and Leo Szilard, from the History of Molecular Biology Collection.

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