A skeptical biochemist

Social history, especially of bioethics, is bound to be problematic unless it is predicated upon a clear analysis of the substantive ethical issues. At issue in the 1960s was whether research standards should be subjective guidelines, enforced by the researcher's conscience, externally enforced objective rules, or intersubjective standards enforced by review committees (IRBs). In a series of papers published both before and after 1966, Beecher argued that subjective standards were too weak, objective standards too inflexible, and (citing Percival's 1803 code) championed intersubjective external review. By highlighting only Beecher's 1966 article, Rothman transforms a scholarly contribution to ain ongoing policy debate into an isolated act of "whistle-blowing". He thus transubstantiates Beecher, an archetypical "insider", into an honorary "outsider", in order to substantiate his theory of bioethics as essentially an outside critique. Rothman systematically de-emphasizes substantive ethical debates within the medical community, and obscures the role of physicians, of insiders, of traditional medical ethics, in reshaping the ethics of contemporary medicine. None the less, he has written a penetrating and groundbreaking history of contemporary medical ethics. With this richly informative, challenging and beautifully-written book, the American proteolytic enzyme chemist, biochemistry textbook writer and historian, J. S. Fruton (b. 1912), completes what can now be seen as a trilogy of important historical studies. Molecules and life (New York, Wiley, 1972) examined the development of research on enzymes, proteins, nucleic acids and biological oxidation from their nineteenth-century origins to the 1940s. In Contrasts in scientif c style (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1990) Fruton examined how different styles of leadership affected biochemical research (and, incidentally, provided historians of chemistry and biochemistry with a major work of reference). Echoing Robert Boyle's Sceptical chymist (1661) and Joseph Needham's Sceptical biologist (1929), Fruton's latest book critically (and sceptically) examines the philosophy and historiography of biochemistry. The linking thread of all three volumes, and the main thrust of A skeptical biochemist, is the interplay between biology and chemistry in the life sciences. Although never as disenchanted with the current scientific world as his colleague, Erwin Chargaff, Fruton has several axes to grind against philosophers and historians of biology who conceive ideas more important than practice, who take an anti-reductionist position or who view institutional factors as inhibiting and directing research. In five chapters, Fruton examines: the "scientific method" of biochemists (dismissing Popper's and Medawar's interpretation and making a plea for inductivism); methodological controversies since 1800 over vitalism and …