By theend of the 20th century, the molecular vision of biology had inessence been realized; what it could see of the master
plan ofthe living world had been seen, leaving only the details to befilled in. The cell had emerged as the basic unit of biology. Thegene had begun to take form (in the mind's eye). The intuitivedisparity between atomic reality and the "biological reality"inherent in direct experience became the dialectic that underlay thedevelopment of 20th century biology. The result was a distortedgrowth of biology in the 20th century. Biology'smarch into
reductionism began in earnest with the "rediscovery"of the gene in the early 20th century. And the molecular dissectionof the cell, which had begun with physiology being redefined (inpart) on the level of enzymology, really took off with the advent of(molecular) genetics. Molecular "templating, tight appositionof molecular contours, seemed to be the modus operandi of biology,the basis of life. Thepinnacle of fundamentalist reductionism in biology was reached withthe Watson-Crick structure of DNA. The organism is. The stability ofan organism lies in resilience, the homeostatic capacity toreestablish itself. The child disperses it again. All of theseproblems are different aspects of one of the great problems in allof science, namely, the nature of (complex) organization. One canalready see the problem of the evolution of cellular organizationcoming to the fore. And because of both its pressing practical andits fundamental nature, the problem of the basic structure of thebiosphere is doing so as well. I received my doctorate in biophysics from Yale University in thespring of 1953, just in time to celebrate the greatest achievement ofthe molecular era, the solving of the double-stranded structure ofDNA . Thegenetic code became for me the looking glass through which I enteredthe world of real biology. Since the beginning of the century,microbiologists had wrestled with the problem of the natural(phylogenetic) relationships among the bacteria, which held the keyto establishing bacteriology as an organismal
discipline (as zoologyand botany already were). The discipline lacked ameaningful concept of the organisms it studied , and there was nocontemporary awareness of the serious effect this was having, notmerely on the development of bacteriology but on the course of allof biology. Enter the infamous "procaryote." I have cometo see the whole unfortunate episode and its outcome as the productof the clash between the classical (home-grown) perception of biologyand the fundamentalist reductionism introduced by molecular biology.