Problems of Modern Biology in Relation to Atomic Physics. A Series of Lectures by M. Delbrück. April and May, 1944. Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING.

1 leaf [title page], 67 leaves. Mimeographed, printed on rectos only. Original stiff blue wrappers, spiral bound. Indentation in upper margin of wrappers and text leaves. Very Good. First Edition, First Printing. COPY OF CURT STERN, with his signature, dated August 1944. Sometime before 1932 Delbrück had known Stern in Germany, and he visited Stern in November 1937 after Delbrück had come to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study the nature of the gene. With loose slip: "Compliments of The Physics Department, Vanderbilt University". The first printing, offered here, is scarce. OCLC does not show any copy in US libraries. There was a second printing in 1946 by the Committee on Growth of the National Research Council. Each lecture is separately paginated. I. Limitations of Atomic Physics as Applied to Biology (9 pp); II. Oxido-Reductions (9 pp); III. Energy-Coupling (6 pp); IV. Photosynthesis I (10 pp); V. Photosynthesis II (9 pp); VI. Genetics I (5 pp); VII. Genetics II (8 pp); VIII. Radiation Effects (10 pp); IX. Bacterial Viruses (8 pp); X. General Summary (2 pp). Delbrück "complained frequently that his teaching duties left too little time for research. He needed time to prepare a series of lectures he was to give at Vanderbilt's School of Medicine in April and May 1944 entitled 'Problems of Modern Biology in Relation to Atomic Physics.' These presentations were reproduced without change in February 1946 and distributed to the grantees of the American Cancer Society; they remained unpublished otherwise. After describing his view of the limitations of applying atomic physics to biology, Max proceeded in these lectures to try to determine how far atomic physics could help in understanding living cells. He discussed metabolism; photosynthesis; genes, their actions and mutations; and bacterial viruses. After first dealing with what he called ordinary biochemistry ('what the cell does with substrates introduced from without'), Max introduced genetics by reviewing the steps that lead to the picture of the gene as a material particle. He described the importance of Mendel's experiments, which showed there are factors that segregate and that can be recovered unchanged from a variety of phenotypes. He explained that cytologists were able to localize these factors in sequence along chromosomes. Then he speculated about the outlook of bacterial genetics: 'We owe our present knowledge, as it were, to two lucky accidents, the bisexuality of the higher organisms and the occurrence of crossing over at meiosis. Since our knowledge of the gene is so intimately tied to those two features, we may wonder whether genes exist also in organisms where there is no sex and no crossing over, as in bacteria.' Max pointed out that genetics now required a biochemical approach: geneticists had produced 'three magnificent problems' for biochemists: 1. What do genes consist of? 2. How do they reproduce? 3. How do they act? Max thus publicly stated his appreciation of biochemistry about a month before he learned of Avery's transforming principle" (Fischer, Ernst Peter & Carol Lipson: Thinking about Science. Max Delbrück and the Origins of Molecular Biology, p. 155). These lectures should not be confused with Delbrück's well-known lecture published in 1949, "A Physicist Looks at Biology." The differences between the two are discussed in Nils Roll-Hansen, "The Application of Complementarity to Biology: From Niels Bohr to Max Delbrück", Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 30, no. 2, 2000, pp. 417-442. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 was awarded jointly to Max Delbrück, Alfred D. Hershey and Salvador E. Luria "for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses.". …