1. As described in W.T. Astbury, ‘Adventures in Molecular Biology’, Harvey Lect. 46(1950–51), 3: “It implies not so much a technique as an approach, an approach from the viewpoint of the so-called basic sciences with the leading idea of searching below the large-scale manifestations of classical biology for the corresponding molecular plan. It is concerned particularly with the forms of biological molecules, and with the evolution, exploitation and ramification of those forms in the ascent to higher and higher levels of organization. Molecular biology is predominantly three-dimensional and structural — which does not mean, however, that it is merely a refinement of morphology. It must of necessity enquire at the same time into genesis and function.”
2. Linus Pauling, ‘Fifty Years of Progress in Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biology’,Daedalus 99(1970), 988–1014.
3. This view is most forcibly expressed in the collection put together to mark Max Delbrück’s sixtieth birthday:Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, ed. J. Cairns, G.S. Stent, and J.D. Watson ( Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Laboratory of Quantitative Biology, 1966 ).
4. An exchange in the literature between John Kendrew and Gunther Stent illustrates the separate descriptions of molecular biology — structural and informational — held by those biologists associated with each type of work. See J.C. Kendrew, ‘How Molecular Biology Started’,Sci. Am. 216(1967), 141–4
5. Gunther S. Stent, ‘That Was the Molecular Biology That Was’,Science 160(1968), 390–5.