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Eloge: Lily E. Kay, 1947–2000

Michael Fischer

Program in Science, Technology, and Society

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Sarah Jansen

Department of History of Science

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02148

Charles Weiner

Program in Science, Technology, and Society

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

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, one of the most outstanding historians of modern biology of her generation, passed away on 18

December 2000. She was only fifty-three years old. Her productivity, energy, and liveliness are already

legendary, and they impress even more against the background of the many years she had cancer. Her

death came as a shock to most of her friends who did not know that she had ever had cancer, much less

that she had a recurrence in 1998 after decades in remission. Not wanting to be perceived as a patient, she

had shared that knowledge with only a very few of her closest friends. This was but one of her many

strategies for living life to the fullest. And she did—as an internationally acclaimed scholar, as an

enthusiastic ballet dancer, as a cosmopolitan equally at home in New York, Boston, Berlin, Paris, and

Salzburg, as a friend to humans and felines. She was much loved by friends and appreciated by colleagues

and students all over the world for her love of life, her generosity, her knowledge, her passion for her

work, her joy of discovery and understanding, and her style. Lily knew how to work hard and how to have

fun, and she knew not to waste life. She had the fire of life, ambition, and determination. Her beautiful

home in Boston became a center for discussion and joyous conviviality among students, colleagues, and

friends.

Lily Kay

Born in Krakow, Poland, on 22 March 1947 to concentration camp survivors, she moved with her parents

to Israel when she was about nine years old. At age thirteen Lily came to New York to live with close

relatives, graduating from high school there and earning a B.S. in physics and mathematics at New York

University in 1969. After graduation she taught high school physics in Pittsburgh before beginning her

career as a researcher. From 1974 to 1977 she pursued biochemical research at the University of

Pittsburgh, and from 1977 to 1980 she worked on the molecular biology of viruses at the Salk Institute.

Seeking an understanding of the contextual workings of science beyond the laboratory, Lily began

graduate work in history of science at the Johns Hopkins University in 1981, and in 1986 she completed

her Ph.D. dissertation, “Cooperative Individualism and the Growth of Molecular Biology at the California

Institute of Technology, 1928–1953.”

In 1986 she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Bibliography at the American Philosophical

Society Library (1986–1988). During that time she prepared

(American Philosophical Society, 1989), an often-used research guide in the history of modern life

science. In 1988 she was appointed an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. In 1989 she moved

to MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, where she taught until 1997. From 1997 on she

Cells, Molecules, and Life: Annotated

Bibliography of Manuscript Sources on Physiology, Biochemistry, and Biophysics, 1900–1960

worked as an independent scholar, supported by a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation; she also

had appointments as a visiting scholar at Harvard and at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of

Science in Berlin.

Lily’s first monograph,

(Oxford, 1993), has now become a classic account. In this book she investigated the

formation of the new discipline of molecular biology under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation. Lily

located the rise of the new physico-biochemical hybrid science between strategies of philanthropic

science funding and research policy in the United States before and after World War II, technical

developments before and during World War II, the local science culture at the California Institute of

Technology, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s agenda of biologically mediated social control, as

demonstrated in its massive support for eugenics. The book was controversial for alluding to the social

engineering agendas of many of those who created the institutional foundations of modern molecular

biology; at the same time, it received accolades from scientists such as Joshua Lederberg and Linus

Pauling and from many historians of biology, who immediately built on the work and the immense

archival source material it integrated.

The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of

the New Biology

In her second major book, (Stanford, 1999),

again provocative and lively, Lily analyzed how between 1953 and 1967 biologists came to view molecules,

organisms, and bodies as information storage and transfer systems and the genome as a text—a book of

life—to be “read” with the tools of molecular biology and, later, to be “edited” through genetic

engineering. Thriving in that period were the fields of cryptanalysis, the kinds of linguistics associated

with Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky, artificial intelligence, and computer languages. Lily traced

the efforts of biologists, biochemists, linguists, and information scientists in elaborating and explaining

an information system written in DNA code. The problem, she argued, was that the genetic code was not

really a code, and therefore cryptanalytic techniques failed to crack it. It was broken instead by

biochemists who translated their work into the metaphor of code only reluctantly, because that language

had become the only way to get a hearing. Oscillating methodologically between approaches to the

analysis of metaphors, to techniques of representation, and to the primacy of material arrangements in

the dynamics of molecular biology, the book is a richly documented history that often reads like a

detective thriller and is filled with extraordinary characters. Long before it appeared Lily was well known

on the lecture circuit for poking holes in the usual hype and buzz around genetics by asserting and

Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code

defending the claim that the code was not a code.

In 2001, at the meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science, a double panel of colleagues and

students honored Lily Kay’s memory with papers that engaged with and extended her work. The papers

will be published as a special issue of the journal In 2002 the Society for Social Studies of

Science awarded the Ludwik Fleck Prize for the best book in the area of science and technology studies to

Kay for

Configurations.

Who Wrote the Book of Life?

At the time of her death Lily was at work on her third major book, on the MIT neuroscientist Warren S.

McCulloch and the making of modern neuroscience, a work supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship

(1997–1998). Her previous work on informational representations of life had exposed her to the cognitive

and cultural impact of the information age and, in particular, to the guidance it gave to the search for the

neuroscientific definition of the mind in a field of forces created by computing, artificial intelligence, and

brain science. While she was unable to complete this book, during the final months of her life she was

able to prepare articles from the work in both German and English, among them a posthumously

published paper, “From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind: Warren S. McCulloch’s Project

in Neuroscience” ( 2001, 591–614).Science in Context, 14:

In addition to her prolific publishing career, Lily Kay organized a series of influential workshops and

conferences. From 1990 to 1995 she coordinated and organized a series of annual workshops and a

fellowship program at MIT, supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, in which leading historians of

molecular biology gathered to advance comparative perspectives on the history of the modern life

sciences. In 1998, together with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger at the Max-Planck Institute for History of

Science in Berlin, she convened an international conference on “Post Genomics” that brought

contributors from molecular biology, history of science, social studies of science, and anthropology

together for a lively and intense exchange across the boundaries of intellectual cultures. She helped shape

this interdisciplinary space among scientists, humanists, social scientists, and historians, and it was in it

that her work was situated.

Lily Kay’s work lives on in reviews of her last book, which are still appearing, in her writings, which are

assigned in courses throughout the world, and in discussions among her colleagues. We mourn the fact

that she was taken from us at the height of her powers. But we celebrate all that she accomplished and her

generosity of spirit. We cherished her friendship. Lily Kay left behind substantial work with long-lasting

influence and an incredible spirit for many of us to live with.

Photo: Bradford F. Herzog.

Copyright © 2003 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.

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