History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

When Charles Darwin convinced the scientific community that species evolve, the long-held essentialist view of each species as fixed was rejected and a clear conceptual understanding of the term was lost. For the next century, a real species problem existed that became culturally entrenched within the scientific community. Although largely solved decades ago, the species problem remains entrenched today due to a suite of factors. Most of the factors that help maintain its perceived intractability have been revealed and logically dismissed; yet this is not widely known so those factors continue to be influential. It is time to recognize this false foundation and relegate the species problem to history.

From a comparative study of the first Latin edition of William Harvey's De motu cordis published in 1628, and the first English edition published in 1653, it is argued that the latter is the printed copy of Harvey's original manuscript written in the vernacular. It will also be shown that Harvey's pre-circulation theory described the heart as an impulsor of blood for several years before his discovery of the circulation of the blood. The crucial aspect of his description was a new explanation of the cause of the arterial pulse as felt at the extremities.

The essay reconstructs the occurrence of the term "organism" and the transformations of its concept from around 1680 to the middle of the nineteenth century. The different sections refer to individual authors who used the word "organism" and situate its usage in specific historical contexts. After earlier uses of the word in medieval sources, the Latin word "organismus" appeared in 1684 in Stahl's medico-physiological writings. Around 1700, it can be found in French (organisme), English (organism), Italian (organismo) and later also in German (Organismus). During the eighteenth century, the word "organism" generally referred to a specific principle or form of order, often in opposition to the order of "mechanism," that could be applied to plants, animals or the entire world. At the end of the eighteenth century, the term became a generic name for individual living entities with inside-outside-interfaces and an inner "organization" of parts. From around 1830, the word "organism" replaced the expressions "organic" or "organized body" as a recurrent technical term in the emerging biological disciplines.

This paper offers an analysis of the analogies between the physical and the political body during the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth centuries. Focusing on a meaningful pattern of medical, legal and political treatises, this study aims to outline the deep roots of an organic image of the human society widespread until the Englightenment and the crisis of the Old Regime.

To analyse the origins of the appearance of the zoonite concept as a unit of segmentary organisation in zoology requires positioning oneself in the context of the first half of the nineteenth century, more specifically in the years 1826-1839. If the origins of the problem go back to Goethe, on the one hand, and to botanists such as de Candolle on the other, the thesis of Moquin-Tandon on the splitting of plants (1826) is an essential step. The hypotheses of multiplication and diversification of organs arranged according to a symmetry, also presides over his research on the Hirudinées (1827). The zoonite is an elementary organic unit which can multiple itself and is structured symmetrically. But what characterises it is that its composition confers on it a certain autonomy. In 1832, Dugès regarded the connection between zoonite and total organism from the angle of organic conformity. He deduced from his observations the laws of multiplicity of organisms, of disposition, of modification and of coalescence. This last law would become vital to Dugès in 1838 for explaining the evolution of the composed being as well as embryonic development. But zoonitism in the 1830s did not constitute a scientific theory, even if it would ultimately serve as a reference, in particular for the animal physiology of Edwards.

In 1882, Tommaso de Amicis, dermatologist and venereologist at the University of Naples, Italy, published a description of twelve cases of Kaposi's sarcoma. This article is the second report about the above-mentioned disease after the first description of five cases by Moritz Kaposi ten years earlier. The publication by De Amicis was organized as a collection of case reports followed by a section containing general considerations about the etiopathogenesis, pathology, diagnosis and therapy of Kaposi's sarcoma. Ten cases are typical of the so-called 'classic' form of the disease, that has a peculiar indolent chronic course, while two out of the twelve cases strongly resemble the clinical form of Kaposi's sarcoma currently recognized as that associated with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The nature of Kaposi's sarcoma is still being debated, but current evidence suggests that it is a viral-associated, if not viral-induced, tumor and its relationship with AIDS is that of an opportunistic disease. Thus, the presence of the clinical form of AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma can be used as a marker of the presence of sporadic cases of AIDS much earlier than its pandemic diffusion.

A unfavourable notice written by industrial magnate Alfred Krupp (1812-1887) has been discovered on the posterior cover sheet of the first volume of the monumental series Fauna und Flora des Golfes von Neapel, edited by the Zoological Station at Naples (1880). Krupp's handwritten statement affords the opportunity to discuss in more detail the intricate relationship between the founder of the first marine biology station, Anton Dohrn (1840-1909), and the owner of the greatest steel factory in Europe, the Krupp-family at Essen. Although Anton Dohrn did not know about Krupp's disapproving comment he had a fine unerring instinct for the mentality of his negotiating partner, whose way of thinking rather aimed at the practical success and completion of armament factory, preventing thus a the serious rapprochement between the two personalities. Even when the Krupp-heir, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, later devoted to questions about marine biology in his new built house at Capri, and was willing to support the Zoological Station with high sponsoring, Anton Dohrn maintained a reserved attitude towards the Krupp's offer to support the marine research financially. Likewise, he remained unimpressed, when the steel magnate was shook by the smear campaign in Capri that ultimately led to Krupp's death in November 1902.

The aim of this study is to show the various aspects of Charcot's methodology from examples provided by Charcot's publications in the field of geriatrics. The source material consists of unedited Charcot's manuscripts, stored in Charcot's library at the Salpêtrière hospital, in Paris. Mainly inspired by Müller's and Virchow's methodologic pattern, J.M. Charcot filled the gap which concerned French medicine, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the rhythm of its discoveries decreased. Charcot substituted successfully the old Parisian 'hospital medicine' for new features of medicine initiated by German doctors. Charcot's methodology implied also a new scientific theory in medicine.

In recent years, the question of national styles in science has received increasing attention. The different forms of Darwinism that emerged in the nineteenth century provide an impressive example of the role of non-scientific factors in the development of scientific ideas. Although the reception of Darwinian theory has been acknowledged to differ according to distinct national traditions even in Darwin's time, there have been few systematic efforts to understand the underlying causal factors. Usually these explanations have conceived of the relationship of science to its social and political context as a distortion of science by ideology. In contrast to this picture, I attempt to demonstrate here how a scientific research program was situated in a concrete historical context. The German tradition of Darwinism in the nineteenth century will be described as a coalition of political liberalism, materialism, and morphology. Whereas the liberals used Darwinism to give their anti-religious and progressive program a naturalistic foundation, the morphologists appreciated that Darwinian theory allowed them to dispense with the idealistic origins of their research program, and the materialist were provided with a naturalistic explanation of the origin of organic form.

This essay compares the first evolutionary syntheses on human prehistory formulated by John Lubbock (1865) in Britain and Gabriel de Mortillet (1869-1883) in France, which both brought the question of human evolution in multidisciplinary light by borrowing tools from archaeology and ethnology rather than from biology. This paper shows that these syntheses displayed similarities as well as differences, and intends to give a comparative assessment of some intellectual and social characteristics of British and French nineteenth-century prehistoric archaeology. Lubbock's and Mortillet's syntheses relied heavily on archaeological collections but these were of different content and status. They stressed progress but they were also organized in accordance to different visions of evolution. Both were articulated from political and religious standpoints, but these standpoints were different in their content and tone.

This paper focuses on a prominent figure in medicine, one who had no visible political ambitions in terms of the NS-regime: Ludwig Aschoff (1866-1942), pathologist at the University of Freiburg from 1906 to 1936. The period between 1914 and 1933 is emphasized in order to show the development of his political and scientific ideas, which were intertwined from the beginning: Aschoff admired the Kaiserreich, and in World War I he tried to carry out a socio-political programme in that he examined the constitution of the German Volk by performing autopsies of almost every German soldier who had been killed in action. After 1918 he retained his conservative ideas and his medical programme which meant concentrating mainly on constitutional ideas. Although Aschoff tried to reestablish international cooperation and to support the new Republic, he ultimately did support anti-democratic ideas. This attitude proved to be a handicap with regard to his reaction to National Socialism in 1933: Although he did not become a member of the party and a strong supporter, he welcomed the new regime. Aschoff, without being aware of his role, supported the acceptance of the regime within the medical scientific community. It will be possible to obtain deeper insight into the NS-period by encouraging research on its 'mediators', for example, Ludwig Aschoff.

The germ theory of disease famously brought a new notion of specificity into concepts of disease. At the same time, the work of Pasteur, Koch and their colleagues was developed during the same decades as Charles Darwin's theories of evolutionary biology challenged traditional notions of the essentialism of biological species. This essay examines some of the ways in which Darwin's work was invoked by British doctors seeking to explain clinical or epidemiological anomalies, in which infectious diseases did not appear to breed true.

This article looks at the contribution to enzymology of Sydney Vines an Joseph Green from the Department of Botany at Cambridge University in the late nineteenth century ,together with the work of Burton -on -Trent brewing scientists ,including Horace Brown F.R.S.

Starting from an assessment of how far Robert Koch's bacteriology had developed in the late 1880s this paper attempts to analyse different aspects of the process that led to the foundation of the Berlin Institute for Infectious Diseases in 1891. With the development of his supposed cure against tuberculosis, tuberculin, Koch attempted to give his research a new direction, earn a fortune with the profits and become more independent of Prussian government officials who, up to that point, had had a major influence on his career. In the period following the presentation of the cure in autumn 1890, however, it became clear that tuberculin's value in treatment was at most dubious. Thus, the failure of tuberculin meant that Koch had to drop his own plans and accommodate those of the Prussian Ministry of Culture. As a result he assumed directorship of the newly founded Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin. Even though this was definitely a prestigious position it reaffirmed Koch's dependency on Prussian government officials and was by no means the kind of institution he had aimed for at the outset.

Edmund Beecher Wilson is generally celebrated for his contribution to chromosome theory and genetics, whereas opinion concerning his cytological thinking is often restricted to the idea that he provided evidence for the dominant role of the nucleus. But Wilson's cell theory was much more. It was a child of the German Zellforschung, and its attempt to provide a comprehensive cellular answer to a wide range of biological and physiological questions. Wilson developed a corpuscular, micromeristic and preformistic concept, and treated the cell as an organism subject to ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes. He defended his comprehensive theory even in the 1920's, when cytological research had become specialised and directed at more practical goals. For many of his younger readers this concept might have seemed antiquated, but today many of its features sound surprisingly modern.

The circumstances under which classical genetics became established at the turn of the nineteenth century have become an integral part of the standard narrative on the history of genetics. Yet, despite considerable scholarly efforts, it has remained a matter of debate how exactly the so-called 'rediscovery' of Mendel's laws came about around 1900. In this situation, unpublished research records can be invaluable tools to arrive at a more substantial and more satisfying picture of the order of historical events. This paper makes extended use of the research protocols covering Carl Correns' hybridisation experiments with Pisum sativum between 1896 and 1899. The resulting reconstruction sketches the portrait of a scientist following a particular research question--xenia--struggling with his experimental material, and slowly building up an epistemic regime in which questions and observations could acquire a relevance which did not strike Correns when he first took note of them. The microhistorical gaze through the magnifying glass of research notes reveals the kind of delays that appear to be constitutive for empirically-driven thinking in general. The research notes of Correns help not only to make this point, they also display some of the intricacies and material peculiarities which characterise the experimental process of hybridisation and the particular type of inferences it allows one to make.

During the first half of the 19th century, idealistic morphology developed into an influential research program in the German biosciences. This program was based on the concept of an ideal connection existing between various living beings. The growth of Darwinian thought and its new paradigm of historical explanation supplanted the idealistic morphology. Yet in the first half of the 20th century the principles of idealistic morphology experienced a powerful revival. Wilhelm Troll (1897-1978) was one of the most significant figures in this renaissance. Guided by the ideas of J.W. von Goethe, Troll established a research program rejecting causal, functional, and phylogenetic explanations as well as the idea of evolutionary adaptation. Instead, he attempted to create a 'pure' morphology based on the descriptions of various plant species. Governed by some explicitly metaphysical presumptions, Troll based his theory on the description of the organismal Gestalt. In consequence, his theory was actually a return to the proper idealistic morphology as it was known in the early 19th century. It lead German botanical morphology to a period of methodological and epistemological return.

Idealistic morphology as articulated by the botanist Wilhelm Troll, the main target of the critique voiced by the early phylogeneticists, was firmly embedded in its contemporary scientific, cultural, and political context. Troll appealed to theoretical developments in contemporary physics in support of his research program. He understood burgeoning quantum mechanics not only to threaten the unity of physics, but also the validity of the principle of causality. Troll used this insight in support of his claim of a dualism in biology, relegating the causal-analytical approach to physiology, while rejuvenating the Goethean paradigm in comparative morphology. This embedded idealistic morphology in the völkisch tradition that characterized German culture during the Weimar Republic and its aftermath. In contrast, the contemporary phylogeneticists anchored their research program in the rise of logical positivism and in Darwin's principle of natural selection. This, in turn, brought phylogenetic systematists of the late 1930s and early 1940s into the orbit of national-socialist racial theory and eugenics. In conclusion, the early debate between idealistic morphologists and phylogenetic systematists was not only ideologically tainted, but also implied a philosophical impasse that is best characterized as a conflict between the Goethean and Newtonian paradigm of natural science.

In the history of behaviorism the paper of the three physiologists Theodor Beer, Albrecht Bethe and Jakob von Uexküll from 1899 plays an important role. Many researchers were influenced by this paper and identified it as fundamental for objective psychological research. But during the period of its adoption (1900-1925) psychologists did not notice that Beer, Bethe and Uexküll had distanced themselves from their own paper, because it had been ignored in physiological and biological discussions. Moreover, one of the three (Beer) had to resign from the scientific community because of private scandal and another one (Uexküll) changed all of his views and left the base of objective science for subjective vitalism. However, this did not change his adoption of behaviorism.

The controversy of neuroanatomy on the principal structure of the nervous systems, which took place at the end of the nineteenth century, is described. Two groups of scientists are identified: one that favoured the idea of a discrete cellular organization of the nervous tissue, and one that favoured a syncytial organization. These two interpretations arose from different histological techniques that produced conflicting pictures of the organization of the nervous tissue. In an experimental reexamination of the techniques used at the end of the nineteenth century, the present study concerns the impact of these different histological procedures on the controversy about the principle nature of the nervous tissue. This controversy could not be resolved by neuroanatomy itself until the 1950s when electron microscopy was introduced into neurobiology. Thus, in a critical period of the conceptual development of neurosciences, neuroanatomy failed to establish a proper base for an interpretation of the functional morphology of nervous tissues.

Why do parasites harm their host? The persistence of this question in the history of the life sciences rests partly on a seeming biological paradox. In effect, although the annihilation of the host by a parasite could be depicted as a crude example of "the survival of the fittest," situations where the host dies rapidly often amount to a pyrrhic victory because parasitic colonies harboured within it may die as well before the transmission stage. So why would natural selection favour high virulence if this results in both the host's and the pathogen's deaths? From the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the late 1970s, it was often considered that, all else being equal, pathogen's evolution towards harmlessness was the expected outcome of long-term biological associations, as it would ensure the survival of both species. Frequently dismissed today as naively adaptationist, this perspective was however widely defended by some of those who pioneered an ecological, even evolutionary view of disease in the early-twentieth century, and was often ascribed to American bacteriologist and comparative pathologist Theobald Smith (1859-1934). Since the early 1980s, the mathematical model of the trade-off--based on the idea that pathogens face several compromises between their mode of transmission, the level of virulence, and the cost of resistance--has challenged the assumed tendency towards harmlessness and has gained currency. This paper first analyzes Theobald Smith's conception of disease, his experimental work on Texas cattle fever, and his formulation of the "law of declining virulence." The following sections then trace the legacy of this model of disease evolution from circa 1900 to its widespread acceptance in the mid-twentieth century and until its downfall in the 1980s. Particular attention is given to the case of the myxoma virus and how it acted as an empirical confirmation of Smith's model in the 1950s. Finally, the paper examines both significant empirical and theoretical challenges to the avirulence model. The present study not only fills a gap in the history of disease transmission and ecology but also sheds light on the intermingled relationship between bacteriology, evolutionary biology, and public health in the past century.

This paper argues both that the decentralized and democratic context in the United States prior to World War II encouraged the development of diverse approaches, programs, and institutional supports for the biological sciences, and that the resulting pluralism is consistent with the complex and messy ways that science is used in a democratic society. This is not a claim that only U.S. science experiences such diversity, nor that the way science plays out in our American form of modified constitutional democracy, are unique. Rather, my intention is to underline the particular character of the diversity and its implications for science and to begin further discussion of this phenomenon. I challenge others to pursue comparative analysis for other places and times, so that we can begin to explore more deeply what meaning this diversity--or the lack thereof--holds for science more generally.

This paper is on dangerous human experimentations with drugs against trypanosimiasis carried out in the former German colonies of German East Africa and Togo. Victory over trypanosomiasis could not be achieved in Berlin because animals were thought to be unsuitable for therapeutic laboratory research in the field of trypanosomiasis. The colonies themselves were necessarily chosen as laboratories and the patients with sleeping sickness became the objects of therapeutical and pharmacological research. The paper first outlines Robert Koch's trypanosomiasis research in the large sleeping sickness laboratory of German East Africa and then focuses on the escalating human experiments on trypanosomiasis in the German Musterkolonie Togo, which must be interpreted as a reaction to the starting signal given by Robert Koch in East Africa.

The article analyzes imitation as both a fascinating and irritating phenomenon in "classical" evolutionary theory. Evolutionists situate imitation on the threshold between the natural and the socio-cultural, hence between the animal and the human. This intermediate position can be regarded as a symptom for the unresolved and maybe unresolvable problem of intentionality and teleology in nature. To elaborate this problem, I examine the ways in which imitation was conceived of by the German Africologist Wilhelm Bleek in his treatise On the Origin of Language and by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man. Bleek and Darwin share a high esteem of imitation, which they see as the mainspring of human mental capacities, including language. But at the same time, imitation for them is the epitome of a low level of consciousness, embodied in the figures of the idiot, the savage, and the ape. Thus, the problem of similarity comes to the fore: similarity produced by imitation, but also being at the basis of every act of imitation. This problem is further evidenced with a side glance on Darwin's remarks about mimicry in The Origin of Species. The article closes with a literary reading of Franz Kafka's Report to an Academy, in which imitation and similarity represent survival strategies and motivate a strange shift from ape to man.

Microscope slides allowed preparations to circulate among scientific and educational contexts. An extension of the circulation of microscope slides was how they became part of lantern exhibition culture. This article considers an early example of the adoption of microscope lantern show conventions by another medium, the cinema. E Martin Duncan, who was employed by Charles Urban to produce a series of popular-science films beginning in 1903, brought his experience with microphotography to bear on the challenge of adapting cinema to the purpose of public instruction. Duncan's first series of films, entitled "The Unseen World," demonstrated both profound links to the display tradition of the lantern lecture as well as the transformation of that tradition by the cinema's representational possibilities.

Using an analogy between moths and men, in 1916, Richard Goldschmidt proposed that homosexuality was a case of genetic intersexuality. As he strove to create a unified theory of sex determination that would encompass animals ranging from moths to men, Goldschmidt's doubts grew concerning the association of homosexuality with intersexuality until, in 1931, he dropped homosexuality from his theory of intersexuality. Despite Goldschmidt's explicit rejection of his theory of homosexuality, Theo Lang, a researcher in the Genealogical-Demographic Department of the Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich, revived it, maintained Goldschmidt's association with it, and argued on its behalf in publications from 1936 to 1960. Lang's appropriation of Goldschmidt's theory did not depend on his resolution of the difficulties Goldschmidt had found with his own theory. Lang and Goldschmidt, I argue, had fundamentally different scientific and social commitments that allowed one to reject this theory of homosexuality and the other to accept it.

This paper focuses on sickle cell anemia and thalassemia as case studies of genetic disease in America. Before the 1950s, these diseases were perceived by many physicians as closely related (indeed, by some as indistinguishable). Sickle cell anemia was defined by most American physicians as a Mendelian dominant disorder specific to African-Americans. As such, it could be 'spread' by any individual parent 'carrier' through reproduction. This view of the disease fed into (and was supported by) prevalent social concerns about miscegenation and, more generally, the dangers inherent in 'negro blood'. A particularly thorny problem for American physicians was how to explain cases of 'sickle cell anemia in white patients'. The paper examines how views about race, blood, and Mendelian genetics informed broader debates about the nature of hereditary disease and social relations in America from 1910 to 1950.

During the early part of the 20th century most embryologists were skeptical about the significance of Mendelian genetics to embryological development. A few embryologists began to study the developmental effects of Mendelian genes around 1940. Such work was a necessary step on the path to modern developmental biology. It occurred during the time when the Evolutionary Synthesis was integrating Mendelian and population genetics into a unified evolutionary theory. Why did the first embryological geneticists begin their study at that particular time? One possible explanation is that developmental genetics was a potential avenue of alliance between embryology and evolutionary biology, two fields that had been separated since the 1890s. To assess this possible motive it is necessary to explore the methodological contrasts that obtained between embryology and both Mendelian-chromosomal genetics and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of these contrasts persist to the present day.

This paper presents a narrative history of technologies in cancer research circa 1920-1978 and a theoretical perspective on the complex, intertwined relationships between scientific problems, material practices and technologies, concepts and theories, and other historical circumstances. The history presents several active lines of research and technology development in the genetics of cancer in the United States which were constitutive of proto-oncogene work in its current form. I write this history from the perspective of technology development. Scientists participating in cancer research created tools with which to study their problems of interest, but the development of the tools also influenced the questions asked and answered in the form of concepts and theories developed. These tools included genetic ideas of the 1920s, inbred mouse colonies, chemicals and antibiotics developed during World War Two, tissue cultures and their technical procedures, and viruses. I examine these tools as standardized experimental systems that standardized materials as well as practices in laboratories. Inbred animals, tissue culture materials and methods, and tumor viruses as experimental systems gave materiality to "genes' and "cancer'. They are technical-natural objects that stand-in for nature in the laboratory.