ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Cell Research and the Divorce of General Physiology from General Biology, 1899-1958: Discord, Divergence, or Pluralism?

• In Event: Contested Sciences

English Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century a methodological dispute over fixation and staining artifacts in histology precipitated into a dramatic divorce in cell biology. On the one side were those who were committed to the chemical microtechniques which had led to the discovery of the chromosomes, mitosis, and meiosis; for these descriptive cytologists and cytogeneticists, microscopy promised to unravel the mysteries of inheritance, development, and evolution, and would be the backbone of general biology. On the other side were the radical skeptics, who wanted to merge cell biology together with physical chemistry; for these self-described general physiologists or protoplasmologists, methodological skepticism and a radical physico-chemical reductionism would unlock the secrets of cellular life, at the cost of demoting microscopy in favor of physical measurement. In this presentation I will bring together several long-standing historiographical debates about the revolt from morphology (Allen, Maienschein, Nyhart, and others) and the shift from taxa-based to problem-based disciplinary divisions (K. Johnson) to reframe the early twentieth century as a period of creative divergence in cell research. I will show that the divorce of general physiology from general biology created a much more divisive pluralism than its authors ever intended, and left the conceptual foundations of cell research in disarray well into the 1950s and the molecularization of cell biology.

Author

• Daniel Liu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign