Interfield Theories, Methods, Collaborations, and Organization in Heredity: Telling the Stories of Developing New Fields and Consolidating Disciplines in Biology

In 1977, Lindley Darden and Nancy Maull focused attention on interfield theories, defined as “theories which bridge two fields of science.” Interfield theories, they noted, “are likely to be generated when two fields share an interest in explaining different aspects of the same phenomenon and when background knowledge already exists relating the two fields.” More recently, William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen (2007) also consider how developing models of biological mechanisms “often requires collaborative effort drawing upon techniques developed and information generated in different disciplines.” Historians of genetics have certainly noted the importance of intersections of fields (cytology and Mendelism, developmental genetics, the modern synthesis). Nonetheless, such accounts still often follow narratives of a succession of theories, concepts, or methodologies. In our session we wish to work towards a more dynamic view of parallel, merging, and diverging developments. Papers will revisit cross-disciplinary collaborations between scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the use of theories, methods, and approaches of different disciplines—chemistry, biochemistry, cytology, and genetics—to forge new fields and map the disciplinary terrain of heredity studies, and, in so doing, of modern experimental biology.