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Essay Review: A Biochemical Ferment, a Documentary History of Biochemistry 1770–1940

With the appearance of this bulky volume the historian of science is surely replete with source books dealing with the principal disciplinary areas of science. The concept of the 'source book' was initiated in 1924 by the American philosopher, Congregational minister and liberal educator, Gregory D. Walcott (1869-1959). Through the support of the American Philosophical Society, Walcott obtained a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and, in 1927, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to launch the series. A year later, the idea received the imprimatur of George Sarton and the History of Science Society when the first two Source Books, on Astronomy (edited by H. Shapley and H. F. Howarth) and Mathematics (edited by D. E. Smith), made their appearance. There were then embarrassing lacunae of six, four and nine years respectively between the appearances of a further three volumes from the presses of McGraw-Hill. There is clearly a jinx on the gestation period for such enterprises,' for Teich's volume, intriguingly described as a "documentary history" rather than as a "source book", has been long in the making. Conceived (chastely) with the Cambridge biochemist, Dorothy Needham, in 1972, the work has been twenty years in the making, fraught by her death in 1987 at the age of91 as well as by his own precarious position within British academe. The result, however, is a masterpiece that works both as a series of reprints, translations and extracts from books and papers concerned with 'the chemistry of life' between the 1770s and 1940s, but also, through its generously-conceived editorial narratives, glosses and documentation, as a history of biochemistry. Dr Teich is well qualified to write such a history. At the age of 26 he escaped from war-tom Europe to read chemistry at the University of Leeds, where he completed a doctorate before returning to the Charles University in Prague as a lecturer in medical chemistry in 1947. Much influenced by the writings of Bernal, Haldane and Needham and other 'leftwing' British scientists, his growing interest in the history and social relations of science was recognized in 1952 when his university transferred him to a post in the subject. Between 1954 and 1968, when the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia's political affairs destroyed his career as the country's leading historian of science and technology, Teich was a Research Fellow at the