Crispin Barker's doctoral dissertation provides the first history of how our current, molecular understanding of aging developed between the 1940s and 1990s, from the Cold War radiation experiments to today's telomere theory. This doctoral dissertation research improvement grant requests funds to visit to six archives in the United States. The object of each of these visits is to analyze documents unique to each archive that tell how a specific biologist or federal research commission studied aging (or, in the case of Barbara McClintock, influenced thinking about aging). The six archives are: the records of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (Washington, D.C.); the Nuclear Testing Archive of the Atomic Energy Commission (Las Vegas, N.V.); the Leo Szilard Papers (La Jolla, C.A.); the Leslie Orgel Papers (La Jolla, C.A.); the H.J. Muller Manuscripts Collection (Bloomington, I.N.); and the Barbara McClintock Papers (Philadelphia, P.A.). Permission to visit each archive and use the required documents has been obtained.
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of this research is threefold. First, it will enable the Co-PI to complete the dissertation. Second, it uses historical documents that have never been studied. Analysis of those documents will make a significant contribution to the history of gerontology and raise awareness of an important, neglected part of these major repositories' collections. Third, Crispin's research is highly interdisciplinary, reflecting the diversity of the sciences that were applied to the study of aging. The Co-PI has developed the expertise needed to conduct this research, and will further increase his interdisciplinary proficiency by visiting these archives.
Broader Impact: This dissertation significantly advances scholarship in the history of science in three ways. First, it moves the history of gerontology past 1930. Previous work by historians on the development of gerontology stops before molecular biology was established as a scientific field. Crispin's dissertation will extend the history of gerontology into the period of radiation biology, DNA, and molecular genetics, and will open the post-World War Two era of aging to research. The dissertation adds a significant chapter to the history of molecular biology. Very little has been done on the influence of military radiation biology on molecular biology in the 1940s and 1950s; it has been overshadowed by the drama of the discovery of DNA. Only one other scholar is working on the topic, and that scholar is also in the first stages of research. Describing the influence of Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and Atomic Energy Commission experiments and theories at this critical juncture will revise our understanding of the development of modern biology. Third, the dissertation provides one of the first in-depth studies of the molecularization of a sub-field of biology. Specialized areas such as gerontology and cancer became molecular sciences after molecular biology was well established. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which sub-fields within biology adopted the molecular paradigm, and how, in alliance with another sub-field or singly, they subtly influenced the direction of molecular biology as a whole. By making this transformation a central theme of his dissertation, the Co-PI will provide historians of science with a new way of thinking about the molecularization of biology and medicine.
