With the development of a mature institutional identity in the 1960s, cell biology joined the ranks of the biological disciplines. Although its roots were interdisciplinary, I have described how it developed into a distinct and enduring discipline. A critical element in this achievement was that it deployed new research techniques, especially cell fractionation and electron microscopy, which enabled its practitioners to explore mechanisms that were inaccessible to existing disciplines such as cytology and biochemistry. Using these tools the pioneers in cell biology, sometimes in collaboration with biochemists and molecular biologists, developed mechanistic explanations of numerous cell functions at multiple levels of organization. The discovery of these mechanisms, as described in Chapters 5 and 6, exemplifies the project of explaining phenomena mechanistically that I presented more abstractly in Chapter 2.

Cell biology, like any discipline, continues to develop and adjust its niche relative to other disciplines. It is most distinctive in (1) the attention it gives to variations in structure and function across cells from different organs and organisms; and (2) its status as an interdisciplinary nexus in which findings from physical, chemical, developmental, and other types of investigation are integrated toward an overall goal of understanding the cell. The emphasis given to different contributing disciplines has changed over time, however. In the 1950s and 1960s, collaborations with biochemists were of crucial importance. More recently, cell biology has drawn closer to molecular biology.

In previous chapters I have focused on how new research techniques, especially electron microscopy and cell fractionation, made it possible for researchers to investigate mechanisms within cells. I have analyzed the development of the first products of these investigations – mechanisms for oxidative metabolism in the mitochondria, for protein synthesis in the endoplasmic reticulum, for protein transport in the Golgi apparatus, and for breakdown and disposal of cellular material in the lysosome. These endeavors were the focus of a new field of science that by the 1960s called itself cell biology. Many researchers chose this term intentionally to mark a distinction between classical cytology, concerned primarily with morphological structure, and the new, initially interdisciplinary enterprise that took on the challenge of integrating structural and functional information about the cell. By the end of the 1960s, this new scientific field had successful occupied the terra incognita between cytology and biochemistry I identified in Chapter 3.

To become more than a temporary enterprise, cell biology needed its own institutional identity. Journals and professional societies are among the defining institutions of a scientific discipline. These provide important channels for scientists not only to disseminate their work, but also to receive credit for it. Publishing in a journal or appearing on a scientific program provides stature to scientists and evidence that their work is recognized by peers. Such institutions, though, play more than a certifying role.

“Seeing is believing.” So we are often told. You do not, however, have to go far to find instances in which seeing is misleading. For example, look at Figure 4.1 and ask yourself whether the shaded surfaces of the two figures are identical in shape. If you are like most people, you will judge that the shapes differ – one long and narrow, the other closer to square. However, you can convince yourself that they actually have identical dimensions if you rotate one of them 90 degrees and measure the corresponding sides. Your visual system misled you in this case about what actually exists in the world, creating what scientists refer to as an artifact (or artefact, especially in older publications).

In the 1950s and 1960s the initial ventures into the terra incognita between classical cytology and biochemistry developed into the robust bridge Palade identified in the above quotation. In large part this involved building on the localization of cellular energetics in the mitrochondria, and of protein synthesis in the microsomes, that had been established in the 1940s by decomposing these organelles and figuring out the operations associated with their parts. I will focus principally on these developments, but in the 1950s investigators identified the function of two other organelles – the Golgi apparatus and the lysosome – and established research programs to determine how they performed their functions.

The focus of this book is creation of cell biology in the mid-twentieth century as a distinct field of biology devoted to discovering and understanding the mechanisms that account for the ability of cells to live.

This book is the product of research spanning two decades. In the 1980s I had been investigating the history of cytology in the nineteenth century and biochemistry in the early twentieth century when I responded to an announcement from the American Society for Cell Biology of a fellowship for support of research on the history of cell biology. With their financial support in 1986 and 1987 I began to examine the creation of modern cell biology in the decades after World War II. I am enormously grateful not only for the fellowship funding but also for the invaluable assistance of individuals associated with ASCB. In particular, I thank Robert Trelstad, then Secretary of ASCB, who invited me to society and executive council meetings, gave me encouragement, and provided entrée to senior members of the society. A number of the founders of modern cell biology were still active in the society and I had the opportunity to meet and interview them regarding their own contributions to cell biology and their recollections of the early days of this field. I also had access to the archives of the society, which were then housed at the Society offices. (They have since been transferred to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.) I have relied heavily on this material in analyzing in Chapter 7 the history of the American Society for Cell Biology.

In the early 1990s I received additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A different kind of science

To many people, cell biology is an unlikely domain to impart impetus for a major shift in the way philosophy of science is practiced. Cells appear to be the object of straightforward empirical observation, not of bold theories that challenge the status quo. In high school or at the museum you look into the microscope and struggle to see what you are told you should see – structures that are never as sharp and well delineated as in the drawings in textbooks. What could cell biology be but a tedious descriptive science? This popular conception, however, is quite erroneous. Cells, as Theodor Schwann first concluded in the 1830s, are the basic units of life. They perform all essential vital functions: extracting energy and building materials from their environment, constructing and repairing themselves and synthesizing products for export, regulating their own internal operations, reproducing themselves periodically by dividing, cleaning up their own waste, and so forth. Beginning in the 1940s an initially small cadre of investigators who were pioneers in the modern discipline of cell biology began to figure out the biochemical mechanisms that enable cells to perform these functions.