The Rockfeller Foundation's Molecular Vision of Life:
How the Aims of Eugenics, Social Control, and Human Engineering Shaped Molecular Biology and 20th Century Science

Chris Masterjohn
January 16, 2009

A Review of Lily E. Kay's The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Is the molecular biology we have inherited from the twentieth century merely a product of the scientific method, an inevitable set of conclusions spawned by the cumulative impartial deduction of theoretical principles from objective observations? Or was it molded, shaped, and directed by an elite establishment that had aims much broader than the pursuit of science?

In her 1993 book The Molecular Vision of Life, Dr. Lily E. Kay, whom a 2001 MIT News Office obituary referred to as "one of the outstanding historians of biology of her generation," argued that the "new biology" was largely created by the Rockefeller Foundation and its subsidiary program at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) through a consensus between a scientific elite and a business elite whose broader aims centered on eugenics and the need to create a mechanism of social control and human engineering:

The new science did not just evolve by natural selection of randomly distributed disciplinary variants, nor did it ascend solely through the compelling power of its ideas and its leaders. Rather, the rise of the new biology was an expresion of the systematic cooperative efforts of America's scientific establishment -- scientists and their patrons -- to direct the study of animate phenomena along selected paths toward a shared vision of science and society.

The term "molecular biology," in fact, was coined in 1938 by Warren Weaver, director of the Rokcefeller's natural sciences division, to rename for the third time the program originally known as "pscyhobiology," the aim of which was "the rationalization of human behavior."

The model Kay uses to describe this historical process is one of "consensus" that does not necessarily require the active complicity of all scientists. Many of them did not share the goals of eugenics, social control, or human engineering. Many of them, even at the elite level, were interested in the pursuit of "pure science," even though they were certainly aware of the goals of the business and administrative elites within the Rockefeller Foundation. Scientists and Foundation elites needed each other, however, and the end result was that the "new biology" would not be an open-ended investigation of "the riddle of life" but would rather be a directed investigation to answer specific questions in ways amenable to the goals of eugenics and social control.

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