Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
RICHARD BROOKE ROBERTS 339 plied Physics Laboratory. He could afford to just be interested in science. That attitude and the opportunities offered by CIW mostly suppressed personal ambition. The five of us formed the core of the group for the longest period, though many others, including Brian McCarthy, Dave Kohne, Bill Hoyer, Nancy Rice, Tom Bonner, and many important fellows and visitors, were part of it. Dick Roberts was, as I remember it, responsible for the ''philosophy" or underlying set of attitudes which set the strategy. One was that basically simple processes were responsible for biological complexity and another was that (anathema to many biologists) a physicist could step in and devise ways to isolate these processes. Whatever one may think about their validity, these are fruitful attitudes and have changed the face of biological knowledge. This summary is best divided into three periods corresponding to two volumes which record the research published in 1955 and 1964 and then the succeeding decade or so. For a fuller history, see page 656 of the second of these volumes or page 172 of CIW Year Book 74 (1975). STUDIES OF BIOSYNTHESIS IN E. COLI Biophysics was redefined as "quantitative research in biology carried out by investigators trained in physics" (CIW Year Book 50 [1951]), in preference to the customary meaning of the time which was instrument development in support of biological research or medicine. After Dick took the phage course, the attitude developed that the host E. coli was more interesting and should be studied during exponential growth so that "normal" pathways of synthesis and processes could be examined. The early interest was in transport and permeability and later moved to biochemical pathways. They both represented opportunities for new insight deriving from radioactive tracers. It is hard, even
