Species and Specificity: An Interpretation of the History of Immunology

ISBN-13: 9780521431729 / Angielski / Twarda / 1995 / 476 str.

Pauline M. H. Mazumdar

Opis

In the first hundred years of the history of immunology, the question of species and specificity were the core problems of research and practice in immunology. The old botanical dispute about the nature of species, which has its roots in the classical Western thought of Aristotle, reappeared in the late nineteenth century in the disputes of bacteriologists, to be followed by their students, the immunologists, immunochemists, and blood group geneticists. In the course of this controversy, Mazumdar argues, five generations of scientific protagonists make themselves aggressively plain. Their science is designed only in part to wrest an answer from nature: it is at least as important to wring an admission of defeat from their opponents. One of those on the losing side of the debate was the Austrian immunochemist Karl Landsteiner, whose unitarian views were excluded from the state health and medical institutions of Europe, where specificity and pluralism, the legacies of Robert Koch and Paul Ehrlich, were entrenched.

Recenzje

'This book is abundantly and well illustrated with many photographs.' Fred S. Rosen, Nature

Spis treści

Part I. Specificity and Unitarianism in XIX Century Botany and Bacteriology: 1. The Unitarians; 2. The Linnaeans; 3. The dominance of specificity; 4. The history of XIX century bacteriology from this point of view; Part II. The Inherited Controversy: Specificity and Unitarianism in Immunology: 5. Dichotomy and classification in the thought of Paul Erlich; 6. Max von Gruber and Paul Erlich; 7. Max von Gruber and Karl Landsteiner; 8. Unity, simplicity, continuity: the philosophy of Ernst Mach; Part III. Chemical Affinity and Immune Specificity: The Argument in Chemical Terms: 9. Structural and physical chemistry in the late XIX century; 10. Erlich's chemistry and its opponents: the dissociation theory of Arrhenius and Madsen; 11. Erlich's chemistry and its opponents: the colloid theory of Landsteiner and Pauli; 12. Erlich's chemistry and its opponents: the new structural chemistry of Landsteiner and Pick; 13. The decline and persistence of Erlich's chemical theory; Part IV. Absolute Specificity in Blood Group Genetics: 14. Immunology and genetics in the early XX century; 15. The specificity of cells and the specificity of proteins; 16. The last confrontation; Conclusion.