Mathias Grote, Humboldt University, Berlin
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture Series
Time: 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m.
Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
Free
Open to the public
Strategies to remake or construct cells or their molecular components have garnered lots of attention in recent years. Centering mostly on recombinant DNA (genetic engineering), debates on early-21st-century synthetic biology sometimes undervalue the fact that the (re)making of substances was first and foremost an endeavor pivotal to modern chemistry. In fact, a whole stream of research in the last century in organic and biochemistry fed into today’s molecular life sciences. The Indian-American organic chemist Har Gobind Khorana, for example, synthesized entire genes “from scratch” in the early 1970s; around the same time, Robert B. Merrifield developed an automated way to assemble peptides from laboratory chemicals. The very term “synthetic biology” was used in the 1980s for attempts to tackle the economic potential of the life sciences in a way similar to organic chemistry a century before.
This presentation will show the different interests at stake in syntheses—as a demonstrative project showing the feasibility of imitating nature by human art as well as a hands-on economic endeavor to produce marketable goods. The interlacing of chemical and biological ways of making life’s components that took place in the late 20th century seems to have not only turned biology more chemical, but it also turned chemistry more biological, thereby transforming the ontologies of both life and of chemical substances.
Mathias Grote is a lecturer at the Institut für Geschichte (History Department) of Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, and a 2015 Ullyot Scholar at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. He received his PhD in 2008 from the Institute of Biology, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, where his dissertation work was in biochemistry and biophysics of membrane transport proteins. He has also been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis), University of Exeter, UK.
About Brown Bag Lectures
Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.
For more information, please call 215.873.8289 or e-mail bbl@chemheritage.org.