Morange M
Ecole Normale Supérieure, Département de Biologie, Paris, France.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 1997;19(3):369-93.
The convergence of developmental biology--embryology--and molecular biology was one of the major scientific events of the last decades of the twentieth century. The transformation of developmental biology by the concepts and methods of molecular biology has already been described. Less has been told on the reciprocal transformation of molecular biology on contact with higher organisms. The transformation of molecular biology occurred at the end of a deep crisis which affected this discipline in the sixties and seventies and which led to a cruel criticism of the preexisting models of gene regulation. Numerous new, sometimes heterodox, models were proposed to describe the level at which gene regulation took place and its underlying mechanisms. The crisis resolved itself at the beginning of the eighties with the rapid accumulation of results from genetic engineering techniques and, above all, a displacement of the descriptive level from the molecule to the cell. This displacement gave molecular biologists the 'explanandum' which had been cruelly lacking during their initial study of higher organisms. The new molecular cell biology is an interfield explanation of living phenomena, relating a description and an interpretation localized at different levels of organization.
发育生物学（胚胎学）与分子生物学的融合是20世纪最后几十年的重大科学事件之一。分子生物学的概念和方法对发育生物学的变革已经有所描述。而关于分子生物学在与高等生物接触时的相互变革，讲述得较少。分子生物学的变革发生在一场深刻危机的末期，这场危机在20世纪60年代和70年代影响了这一学科，并导致了对先前基因调控模型的严厉批评。人们提出了许多新的、有时甚至是异乎寻常的模型来描述基因调控发生的层面及其潜在机制。随着基因工程技术成果的迅速积累，尤其是描述层面从分子向细胞的转移，这场危机在80年代初自行化解。这种转移为分子生物学家提供了他们在最初研究高等生物时严重缺乏的“被解释项”。新的分子细胞生物学是对生命现象的跨领域解释，它将不同组织层次上的描述和解释联系起来。
