A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology

This piece is noticeably longer (twice the length) than the others on this Substack.

This piece is noticeably longer (twice the length) than the others on this Substack. This is because 1) it is a practically-oriented historical follow-up on the ideas discussed in this Substack’s most popular piece on scientific branch-creation and 2) unlike the MIT series, there was not a reasonable way to break the research up into a series of distinct pieces. I took three times as long as usual to write and research this one, and I’m so excited to finally present it to you. Enjoy! Since the explosion in physics knowledge of the early 1900s, driven largely by discoveries in quantum…

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