Today's science tells us that our bodies are filled with molecular machinery that orchestrates all sorts of life processes. When we think, microscopic "channels" open and close in our brain cell membranes; when we run, tiny "motors" spin in our muscle cell membranes; and when we see, light operates "molecular switches" in our eyes and nerves. A molecular-mechanical vision of life has become commonplace in both the halls of philosophy and the offices of drug companies, where researchers are developing "proton pump inhibitors" or medicines similar to Prozac. Membranes to Molecular Machines explores just how late twentieth-century science came to think of our cells and bodies this way. This story is told through the lens of membrane research, an unwritten history at the crossroads of molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, and the neurosciences, that directly feeds into today's synthetic biology as well as nano- and biotechnology. Mathias Grote shows how these sciences not only have made us think differently about life, they have, by reworking what membranes and proteins represent in laboratories, allowed us to manipulate life as "active matter" in new ways. Covering the science of biological membranes in the United States and Europe from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, this book connects that history to contemporary work with optogenetics, a method for stimulating individual neurons using light, and will enlighten and provoke anyone interested in the intersection of chemical research and the life sciences--from practitioner to historian to philosopher.

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Molecular-Mechanical Vision of Life
  • Descartes among the X-ray machines? Mechanisms, molecular machines, and the epistemology of science
  • Life and matter—another history of the molecular life sciences after 1970
  • Constitutive and exemplary: Bacteriorhodopsin, membranes, and the rise of molecular machinery
  • A note on people and places, times and sources
  • Outline of the book
• Part One: Taking Membranes Apart, Isolating a Molecular Pump
  • 1. What Membranes Can Tell a Historian and Philosopher of the Life Sciences
    • The cell’s elusive boundaries and the molecular age
    • Neglected dimensions: Membrane structure
    • "The riddle of surface action" — membrane dynamics
    • Membranes as black boxes
    • Pumps and transducers — metaphors in search of a substrate
    • Receptors and transducers, or materializations of cellular communication in the cybernetic age
    • Proteins and the promise of molecular mechanisms
    • The membrane frontier
    • Conclusion
  • 2. Active Matter
    • From membrane images to membranes as Stoff — Rockefeller University, 1960s
    • From Stoff to molecule — San Francisco c. 1970
    • Purple to yellow — an active membrane material
    • The chemistry of material activity
    • Membrane structure rendered tangible
    • The new biology of membranes
    • Nature’s pleasant clue on membranes
    • Mechanical matter — Munich, 1970–1974
    • From color change to molecular mechanism—optical spectrometry
    • Cells in action—toward bioenergetics
    • Plugged into the circuit—a "molecular electric generator," Moscow 1974
    • The pump takes shape, Cambridge 1973–75
    • Material bricolage
    • Data instead of images—a new electron microscope
    • Contouring the pump
    • Visualizing molecules and mechanisms
    • Toward cryo-electron microscopy
    • Conclusion – from Stoff to molecular pump
• Part Two: Remaking Membranes and Molecular Machines
  • 3. Synthesizing Cells and Molecules — Mechanisms as "Plug-and-Play"
    • Making cell simulacra in the test tube — liposomes
    • Reconstituting the bioenergetic cell — Efraim Racker, liposomes, and molecular machinery
    • From chemiosmosis to molecular mechanisms
    • A plug-and-play — biology
    • Remaking life’s molecular inventory
    • Synthetic molecular biologists — making molecules in retorts and by machines
    • Making and unmaking molecules for structure and mechanisms
    • Molecular infrastructures — convenience genes
    • Mastering and playing with molecules
    • Conclusion I: Plug-and-play, mechanisms, and the integration toward the molecular life sciences
    • Conclusion II: From making molecules and cells to synthetic biology? A genealogy of practices in between chemistry and the life sciences
  • 4. Biochip Fever: Life and Technology in the 1980s
    • Alternative computing
    • Beyond silicon — lifelike electronics
    • Membranes and proteins as biological technologies
    • Cloning a computer — the ultimate scenario of recombinant DNA
    • Molecular bionics: Self-organization, evolution, and adaptation
    • From protein to prototype: Materializing a "molecular switch"
    • Biotech and molecular electronics in West Germany
    • Visioneering versus upscaling — materializations of molecular devices
    • Conclusion I: Assemblers, Cartesian molecular machines, and active matter
    • Conclusion II: After the fever pitch — a more inclusive history of biotechnology
• Conclusion
  • Matter, activity, and mechanisms at the interstice of the chemical and the life sciences
  • Molecular machinery in past, present, and beyond
  • The bigger picture — membranes and molecular machines in the history of the life and the chemical sciences
  • Beyond life? Places and scientists after molecular biology
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Notes
• Sources
• References
• Index