Science Quote by Edward Lawrie Tatum

Tatum’s sentence has the restrained confidence of mid-century biology announcing a revolution without banging the drum. The key phrase is “coming to be better understood”: it signals a field shifting from grand, speculative arguments about evolution to something that can be trapped, counted, and repeated on a lab bench. In an era when evolutionary theory still carried ideological baggage in public life, he plants the flag in method. Not “evolution is true,” but “here is how we can watch it work.”

The technical heart of the line is “bacterial cultures of mutant strains,” a quietly radical choice of subject. Bacteria reproduce fast, mutate often, and can be controlled with ruthless simplicity. That makes them an ideal arena for separating mutation (the generation of variation) from selection (the filtering of that variation). Tatum is pointing to a new kind of evidence: not fossils or field observations, but experimental evolution - evolution as a manipulable process. The subtext is institutional as much as intellectual: microbiology is positioning itself as the discipline that can arbitrate old debates by producing data, not rhetoric.

Context matters. Tatum, a Nobel-winning geneticist, worked at the moment when genetics and microbiology were fusing into molecular biology. His emphasis on “mutant strains” echoes the postwar rise of standardized model organisms and the belief that life’s complexity could be reduced to tractable systems. There’s also a subtle argument about legitimacy: bacterial experiments don’t just illuminate microbes; they claim authority over evolution itself, shrinking a sweeping theory down to the scale of a Petri dish - and then expanding its credibility back out to all of biology.