History of Biology

Carlo Forlanini (1847-1918), a medical doctor professor at the universities of Turin and Pavia, was the inventor of artificial pneumothorax, a method that allowed a first significant victory in the long war of medicine against pulmonary tuberculosis. The article outlines a portrait of this important clinician and focuses on the therapeutic innovation he introduced for the treatment of this infectious disease.

Metaphors are ambivalent and powerful tools of science and used and reflected as such since Baconian times. There is a consensus not only within this anthology but also espoused within philosophy, psychology, science and technology studies that, within the natural sciences, metaphors play very important educational roles (e.g. Maasen & Weingart 2000, Lakoff & Núñez 2000, Keller 1995, Hesse 1966, Gentner & Grudin 1985, Gentner & Jeziorski 1993, Cooke & Bartha 1992). Metaphors are often used in areas where meaning is otherwise hard to convey (Schmitt 2003). They frequently appear in communication between experts and laypeople and are thus a common ingredient in media publications about the natural sciences.
As metaphors are an essential tool in all complex communicative situations (Johnson 2010), they play a leading role within the public media and popular science. When topics of natural science and medicine are transmitted to the broader public, the communicative situation between speaker and audience is often understood as similar to that within schools or universities: for a long time at least it was assumed that ‘the public’ lacked sufficient knowledge about the natural sciences and technology, especially when taking a specific (and in particular a critical) position regarding the natural sciences (Marks 2009). It was assumed that the public simply required proper information in order to adopt a more positive stance.
When new technology needs to be explained to a lay audience by means of illustration and modeling, this often comes in combination with humor and mostly aims at convincing the audience of the benefits of this technology (Semino 2008, Herrmann 2013). We find such a situation whenever new technology is presented to the public with the aim of a discursive change in favor of these developments, as for instance the introduction of alternative energy, green revolution, education reform or space exploration. Expert discourse going public about contested technology shows a very specific use of metaphors, as this study reveals.

Imparare dal passato, verrebbe da dire. Affrontiamo il tema coronavirus partendo da una prospettiva storica per arrivare ad alcune considerazioni sul presente. Ne parliamo con il professor Paolo Mazzarello. Si può fare una sintesi delle epidemie e delle pandemie dal medioevo e dall'età moderna ad oggi? Furono molte e drammatiche. Iniziamo con la peste di Giustiniano, che esplose nel 541-42 e fu una delle più spaventose della storia. Venne segnalata in Egitto e raggiunse Costantinopoli per diffondersi in tutto il bacino del Mediterraneo, con ondate successive, fino al 750, provocando milioni di morti. Epidemie meno devastanti ma che si sono incise nella memoria collettiva dell'Oc cidente, sono quelle legate alla lebbra: una malattia batterica, conosciuta fin dall'anti-chità, ma che si diffuse molto a seguito delle Crociate. Andando più avanti con gli anni, invece? Vorrei ricordare la grande peste del 1347-50, che esplose in Oriente e sterminò quasi un terzo della popolazione europea. E poi ancora la diffusione della sifilide, che risale al 1494-95, probabilmente giunta a noi dal 'Nuo-vo Mondo' con i viaggi di Colombo e dei suoi successori.. Le epidemie ancora di peste, in particolare nell'Italia settentrionale del 1629-30 e a Londra del 1665-66, quelle periodiche di vaiolo, l'esplosione del colera nel corso dell' 800, e le nuove infezioni apparse nell'ultimo secolo. 1918: finisce la 'Grande Guerra' e bisogna combattere subito con un altro nemico: l'epidemia di spagnola. Come reagiscono le società dell'epoca? La

Paul Valéry’s interest for the life sciences is an important yet understudied aspect of his work. Known primarily as a reader of mathematics and physics, Valéry’s fascination with the life science has often been ignored or regarded as mere curiosity. The article examines Valéry’s writing on the subject of biology by focusing on the unique status he accords to the notion of life. In his theoretical and poetic writings, Valéry addresses the notion of life as a category endowed with distinct ontological attributes, as a phenomenon which encompasses a distinct type of order. Since the living process creates its own physical milieu and duration, it is capable of resisting and even of reversing the principle of entropy, which Valéry regards as a universal tendency towards degradation and dispersion which affects all inanimate matter. Valéry’s thought thus exhibits a complicated yet clear affinity with the intellectual tradition known as vitalism. The article discusses this affinity by analyzing the presence of vitalist ideas and imagery in Valéry’s corpus, giving special attention to his most expressly “biological” work, the essay L’Homme et la coquille (The Man and the Seashell).

L'intérêt de Paul Valéry pour les sciences de la vie est un aspect important mais peu étudié de son travail. Connu principalement comme un lecteur de mathématiques et de physique, la fascination de Valéry pour les sciences de la vie a souvent été ignorée ou considérée comme une simple curiosité. L’article examine les écrits de Valéry sur le sujet de la biologie en se concentrant sur le statut unique qu’il accorde à la notion de vie. Dans ses écrits théoriques et poétiques, Valéry aborde la notion de vie comme une catégorie dotée d'attributs ontologiques distincts, comme un phénomène qui englobe un ordre distinct. Puisque le processus vivant crée son propre milieu physique et sa propre durée, il est capable de résister et même de renverser le principe d'entropie, que Valéry considère comme une tendance universelle à la dégradation et à la dispersion qui affecte toute matière inanimée. La pensée de Valéry présente ainsi une affinité compliquée mais claire avec la tradition vitaliste. L’article discute de cette affinité en analysant la présence d’idées et d’images vitalistes dans le corpus de Valéry, en accordant une attention particulière à son œuvre la plus «biologique», l’essai L’Homme et la coquille.

Margulis’s observation that constituent parts of the same cell had different genetic histories was largely written off as crank science in 1964 when she started submitting her paper on the topic to academic journals. No one wanted it.

After more than a dozen rejections, the Journal of Theoretical Biology published “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells” in 1967, and then something very interesting happened. Requests for reprints started pouring in, more than eight hundred in all. “Nothing like that had ever happened in the Boston University biology department,” Margulis says. Although she was a part-time adjunct professor there at the time, she won a prize for faculty publication of the year. Eventually, a full-time position that lasted twenty-two years followed.

But in spite of, or maybe because of, this modicum of recognition, the scientific establishment viewed her skeptically, if not with outright hostility. Her grant proposals weren’t funded. Margulis tells of being recruited for a distinguished professorship at Duke University, only to have it subverted at the last minute by a whispering campaign.

Margulis innovation was probably the single most important idea in evolution theory since Darwin's.  We say that because we believe that its full significance has not yet been even dimly sighted.

By showing how the inner life of the cells within ourselves and other organisms is dependent on the settling in of a parasite bacterial/rickkettsial cell, which then has evolved and endured as our mitochondria she has set the stage for a remarkable and necessary revolution in medicine, whose urgency is only shockingly signaled by this Corona Virus situation and the puzzlement which still seems to afflict our 'experts"

The situation is not unlike that of the Copernican revolution which forced us to see a non egocentric vision of the universe/solar  system with humans and our planet being far from the central actor on the stage of the unfolding drama of humanity.  However it took centuries thereafter until that insight gave birth to Newton's laws of mechanics which connected that initial glimpse of true situatedness and the practicalities of resolution of mechanics down here on earth.  It took that long for the articulation of the connection between the earth revolving around the sun and the apple falling off the tree right in front of our eyes.

Even with Margulis' forcing of the change in evolution theory to finally reoognized our own organismic situatedness as determined not by us or for us, or for that matter, by our own genes and our own highly touted 'genome",  we still have not recognized how the understanding of the mitochondria as bacteria-like parasites allows us to make sense of much of the chaos of modern medicine...

This is not a chaos due to the lack of knowledge or the failure to discover masses of fascinating data, but it is a chaotic perplexity due to an inability to understand the marvelous findings of our technology. 

We have not yet drawn the necessary tight relation between the nature of evolution which seems still so distant from our immediate medical concerns and re- interpreting those concerns in terms of the dominant evolution based role of the mitochondria and their genome  We surely do have the 'tail and the dog' mixed up.

A set of understandings that arrives finally at some semblance of 'rules' for understanding medicine and its 'mechanics" can only arise if we finally appreciate that the mitochondrion is the charismatic star on center stage, and we,  and our individual cells with their vastly overrated 'genomes", ,  as' 'hosts" are merely the supporting actors.

The gist of this "Notebook is to encourage those who are the active 'experts' in the field of medicine and evolution to coordinate their notions and to develop a medicine which is not confounded by events in almost every area of practice by the failure to realize that that medical problems of today can only be solved by seeing the Copernican re interpretation that we have had since Margulis epic paper.

The time of the 'selfish gene" and the selfish genome" is long past.  That age old wisdom of 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" was not quite right.  But we can see now that the 'ontogenetic actions of mitochondria reflect the historical evolution of the species of which mitochondria were not only a historical contributor but which those mitochondria determine, as we write, by further providing for the organism's 'evolvability" which is behind all observations of 'evolution"

This is an inquiry into the meaning of "soul itself" in Aristotle. It is argued that
(i) the soul itself is the first explanatory principle of the science of living things.
(ii) the soul itself contrasts with the "per se accidents" of the soul in the following way: the per se accidents of the soul are all the universal and necessary attributes of living things that can be explained with reference to the soul itself as their first principle.
(iii) these universal and necessary attributes are all the phenomena of the science of living things. In the case of animals (not plants) these phenomena are: the functional body parts, the actions and affections, habits, and character traces of animals.
(iv) the soul itself is not defined by way of the "commonest account" of the soul in De anima II 1 but by way of the so-called "parts of the soul".

Zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhundert läßt sich beobachten, daß mindestens zwei eng mit biologischer Reproduktion verflochtene Diskurse aus gänzlich unterschiedlichen Richtungen die Befruchtung und die Infektion bzw. Viren und Spermien als gleichsetzbar behandeln. Dies wird möglich, da die Vervielfältigung des Genoms (als Replikation gleichgesetzt mit Reproduktion) ins Zentrum der Betrachtung rückt, nachdem zunächst die Außengrenzen von Individuen durch den Blick auf das Genom unsichtbar wurden. Diese Entgrenzung kann Möglichkeiten für beispielsweise
Geschlechterkonstruktionen erweitern, birgt aber auch Risiken durch
die Unsichtbarmachung von Unterschiedlichkeiten.

„Virulente Perspektiven der Reproduktion. Von der Befruchtung zur entgrenzten Infektion“, in: Engel, Gisela; Karafyllis, Nicole C. (Hg.) Re-Produktionen. Berlin: trafo 2005, S. 115-130.

By the summer of 1948, socialist Yugoslavia seemed determined to follow in the footsteps of its closest ally, the Soviet Union, and strike a decisive blow to “reactionary genetics.” But barely a month before the infamous VASKhNIL session, the Soviet–Yugoslav split began to unravel, influencing the reception of Lysenko’s doctrine in Yugoslavia. Instead of simply dismissing it as yet another example of Stalinist deviationism, Yugoslav mičurinci carefully weighed its political and ideological implications, trying to negotiate the Stalinist origins of Michurinist biology with political and ideological reconfigurations in post-Stalinist Yugoslavia. The essay examines the strategies employed by supporters and opponents of Lysenko’s doctrine, as well as those sympathetic to it but yet unconvinced of its scientific validity and political appropriateness. It emphasizes globally unique attempts to de-Stalinize Michurinist biology and use it in the political-ideological struggle against the Stalinist Soviet Union, pointing to local agency and the bottom-up nature of attempts both in support of and against the doctrine.

More quoted than read, Lamarck remains known for the much derided example of the giraffe stretching her neck to reach higher leaves. An example that occurs only tree times in his published corpus. The book argues that to read Lamarck in his own time is much more interesting and fascinating than to ask the meaningless question of whether he was or not Darwin's precursor.

The phenomena of life and their explanation was at the center of much of ancient Pre-Socratic cosmological reflection about the nature of the universe as a whole. I offer a short description of the core commitments of what I call the „cosmological method“ of these early Greek thinkers. These commitments may be summarized under three headings: organic holism (the whole universe is one living thing, of which we and everything else in it are parts), methodological monism (one and the same mode of explanation and one set of principles for all things in the cosmos), and ultimate philosophical ambition (the ambition of answering the deepest metaphysical questions). I argue that Plato, in spite of his revolutionary innovation of the cosmological method through the introduction of the teleological mode of explanation and its juxtaposition with a mechanical mode of explanation, fundamentally continues to be a part of that same tradition. It is only with Aristotle that the core tenets of the old cosmological tradition are abandoned. Aristotle distinguishes between several different, and partly overlapping, sciences. In particular, the study of living things becomes an autonomous science with principles, methods and ambitions of its own. Aristotle furthermore introduces for the first time the idea that living things are ends in themselves. With this, I argue, he paved the way for what we since then recognise as biology.