Between CERN and Cold Spring Harbor: Shaping the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (1967-1978)

This article reconstructs the political, institutional, and scientific processes that led to the founding of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, tracing the trajectory of the EMBO Laboratory project from its substantial redesign in 1967 through the intergovernmental negotiations that culminated in the EMBL treaty of 1974. Against existing historiography centered on the early 1960s, the article proposes a revised chronology: the EMBO Laboratory was not designed in 1963-64 but in 1967-71, and its history cannot be understood without foregrounding the role of the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC) as the institutional and diplomatic arena through which the project was debated, reshaped, and ultimately realized. The first two sections examine two successive proposals-the "Nice proposal" (1967-68) and the "Konstanz proposal" (1969-70)-showing how they articulated the tension between centralization and decentralization in the Europeanization of molecular biology, and how EMBO functioned as an epistemic community that negotiated disciplinary boundaries, coordinated national interests, and mobilized political support among European governments. The third section analyzes the siting process, demonstrating how the choice of Heidelberg emerged from a conflictual interplay of intergovernmental competition, national research agendas, and local conditions. More broadly, the article situates the origins of EMBL within the specific dynamics of European integration in the late 1960s and early 1970s, arguing that the establishment of EMBC and EMBL was not only a product of this integration process but also an instrument of it.