The phrase “regenerative medicine” is used so often and for so many different things, with such enthusiasm or worry, and often with a sense that this is something radically new. This paper places studies of regeneration and applications in regenerative medicine into historical perspective. In fact, the first stem cell experiment was carried out in 1907, and many important lines of research have contributed since. This paper explores both what we can learn about the history and what we can learn (...) from the history of regenerative medicine research. (shrink)

In historical literature, Edouard van Beneden is mostly remembered for his cytological discoveries. Less well known, however, is that he also introduced evolutionary morphology – and indeed evolutionary theory as such – in the Belgian academic world. The introduction of this research programme cannot be understood without taking both the international and the national context into account. It was clearly the German example of the Jena University that inspired van Beneden in his research interests. The actual launch of evolutionary morphology (...) at his University of Liège was, however, also connected with the dynamic of Belgian university reforms and the local rationale of creating a research “school.” Thanks to his networks, his mastering of the rhetoric of the “new” biology, his low ideological profile and his capitalising on the new academic élan in late-19th century Belgium, van Beneden managed to turn his programme into a local success from the 1870s onwards. Two decades later, however, the conceptual underpinnings of evolutionary morphology came under attack and the “Van Beneden School” lost much of its vitality. Despite this, van Beneden’s evolutionary morphology was prototypical for the research that was to come. He was one of the first scientific heavyweights in Belgium to turn the university laboratory into a centre of scientific practice and the hub of a research school. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, entitled, Truth and Progress,.

Emphasis on cutting edge science is common today. This paper shows that the concept, which selects some science at any given time as epistemically preferable and therefore better, actually gained acceptance by the turn of this century in biology and began immediately to have consequences for what biological research was done. The result, that some research is cut out while other work is privileged, can have pernicious results. Some of what is designated as not cutting edge may, in a different (...) — and equally defensible epistemological framework, prove just as good as the officially cutting edge research. Cutting edges cut both ways, and those who study science should begin exploring the implications of that fact. (shrink)

Richard Levins’ distinction between aggregate, composed and evolved systems acquires new significance as we recognize the importance of mechanistic explanation. Criteria for aggregativity provide limiting cases for absence of organization, so through their failure, can provide rich detectors for organizational properties. I explore the use of failures of aggregativity for the analysis of mechanistic systems in diverse contexts. Aggregativity appears theoretically desireable, but we are easily fooled. It may be exaggerated through approximation, conditions of derivation, and extrapolating from some conditions (...) of decomposition illegtimately to others. Evolved systems particularly may require analyses under alternative complementary decompositions. Exploring these conditions helps us to better understand the strengths and limits of reductionistic methods. (shrink)

Review by Alan Love of "Keywords & Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology." Hall, Brian K. and Wendy M. Olson (Eds), Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Hb. 476+xvi pp.

This paper discusses how growth and aging became interrelated phenomena with the creation of gerontology in the United States. I first show that the relation of growth to senescence, which had hardly attracted scientific attention before the twentieth century, started to be investigated by several experimental scientists around the 1900s. Subsequently, research on the connection between the two phenomena entered a new domain through the birth of gerontology as a scientific field comprised of various disciplines, many of which addressed growth. (...) Due to gerontologists’ efforts, the association between aging and growth became stronger and more multifaceted within the discursive and organizational matrix constituting the new science, leading to a broader definition of senescence with an ambiguous connection to chronological age. Furthermore, as gerontologists borrowed the cultural agendas as well as research methods from studies of growth, aging began to be defined as a phenomenon that could be actively controlled and managed in both social arenas and laboratory environments. (shrink)

The Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (1884) was founded in 1888. In addition to conducting morphological and other biological research, the founders of the laboratory aimed at promoting research in experimental zoology which will be used in this paper as a synonym for e. g. experimental embryology, comparative physiology or general physiology. This dream was not fully realized until 1920. The Great War and its immediate aftermath had a positive impact on the development of (...) the Plymouth Laboratory. The war greatly upset the operation of the Zoological Station in Naples and the ensuing crisis in its operations was closely related to the establishment of the physiological department in Plymouth in 1920. Two other key factors in the Plymouth story were the establishment of the Development Fund in 1909, which began contributing funds to the Plymouth Laboratory in 1912, and the patronage of the Cambridge zoologist George P. Bidder (1863-1954). This paper will focus on the combined influence of the Development Fund and Bidder on the development of the Plymouth Laboratory from around 1902 through the early 1920s, and the important role the laboratory played in promoting experimental zoology in Britain in the 1920s. (shrink)

The relatively new field of evolutionary developmental biology continues to attract considerable attention from biologists, philosophers, and historians, in part, because work in this field demonstrates that important changes are underway within biology. Though studies of development and evolution were closely connected during the 19th century, continued work in genetics fostered a general split between the two during the first decades of the twentieth century (e.g., Allen 1978; Gilbert 1978; Mayr and Provine 1980; Gilbert, Opitz and..

The technique of nuclear transplantation – popularly known as cloning – has been integrated into several different histories of twentieth century biology. Historians and science scholars have situated nuclear transplantation within narratives of scientific practice, biotechnology, bioethics, biomedicine, and changing views of life. However, nuclear transplantation has never been the focus of analysis. In this article, I examine the development of nuclear transplantation techniques, focusing on the people, motivations, and institutions associated with the first successful nuclear transfer in metazoans in (...) 1952. The conflict between embryologists and geneticists over the mechanisms of differentiation motivated Robert Briggs to pursue nuclear transplantation experiments as a way to resolve the debate. Briggs worked at the Lankenau Hospital Research Institute, a research facility devoted to the study of cancer. The goal of understanding cancer would play a role in the development of the technique, and the story of nuclear transplantation sheds light on the role that biomedical contexts play in biological research in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The article sums up a number of points made by the author concerning the response to Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and repeats the claim that a proper understanding of the theory's impact must take account of the extent to which what are now regarded as the key aspects of Darwin's thinking were evaded by his immediate followers. Potential challenges to this position are described and responded to.

During the 1870s animal morphologists and embryologists at Cambridge University came to dominate British zoology, quickly establishing an international reputation. Earlier accounts of the Cambridge school have portrayed this success as short-lived, and attributed the school's failure to a more general movement within the life sciences away from museum-based description, towards laboratory-based experiment. More recent work has shown that the shift in the life sciences to experimental work was locally contingent and highly varied, often drawing on and incorporating aspects of (...) museum work. Thus in order to understand the more general changes, studies of particular sites are needed. Here I examine the organisation of teaching at Cambridge, both in terms of the spaces in which it was taught and the ways in which teaching and examining were organised, to bring out the complexities of the 'revolt from morphology' and to show in more detail the institutional aspects that intertwined with intellectual change. Francis Maitland Balfour, as head of the Cambridge school, was able to make use of family connections and his own personal wealth to promote morphology. His successor lacked these resources, and one competition within the natural sciences at Cambridge intensified, morphology was unable to compete properly. (shrink)

Garland E. Allen’s 1978 biography of the Nobel Prize winning biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan provides an excellent study of the man and his science. Allen presents Morgan as an opportunistic scientist who follows where his observations take him, leading him to his foundational work in Drosophila genetics. The book was rightfully hailed as an important achievement and it introduced generations of readers to Morgan. Yet, in hindsight, Allen’s book largely misses an equally important part of Morgan’s work – his study (...) of development and regeneration. It is worth returning to this part of Morgan, exploring what Morgan contributed and also why he has been seen by contemporaries and historians such as Allen as having set aside some of the most important developmental problems. A closer look shows how Morgan’s view of cells and development that was different from that of his most noted contemporaries led to interpretation of his important contributions in favor of genetics. This essay is part of a special issue, revisiting Garland Allen's views on the history of life sciences in the twentieth century. (shrink)

In his 1987 book "Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology", Philip Pauly presented his readers with the biologist Jacques Loeb and his role in developing an emphasis on control of life processes. Loeb's work on artificial parthenogenesis, for example, provided an example of bioengineering at work. This paper revisits Pauly's study of Loeb and explores the way current research in regenerative medicine reflects the same tradition. A history of regeneration research reveals patterns of thinking and research (...) methods that both echo Loeb's ideology and point the way to modern studies. Pauly's work revealed far more than we readers realized at the time of its publication. (shrink)

In Social Empiricism, Miriam Solomon proposes a via media between traditional philosophical realism and social construction of scientific knowledge, but ignores a large body of historical literature that has attempted to plough just that path. She also proposes a standard for normatively appropriate consensus that, arguably, no theory in the history of science has ever achieved, including her own ideal type—plate tectonics. And while valorizing dissent, she fails to consider how dissent has been used in recent decades as a political (...) tool to challenge scientific evidence on diverse issues, including the link between tobacco and cancer and the reality of anthropogenic global warming. (shrink)

Early in his career Thomas Hunt Morgan was interested in embryology and dedicated his research to studying organisms that could regenerate. Widely regarded as a regeneration expert, Morgan was invited to deliver a series of lectures on the topic that he developed into a book, Regeneration. In addition to presenting experimental work that he had conducted and supervised, Morgan also synthesized and critiqued a great deal of work by his peers and predecessors. This essay probes into the history of regeneration (...) studies by looking in depth at Regeneration and evaluating Morgan’s contribution. Although famous for his work with fruit fly genetics, studying Regeneration illuminates Morgan’s earlier scientific approach which emphasized the importance of studying a diversity of organisms. Surveying a broad range of regenerative phenomena allowed Morgan to institute a standard scientific terminology that continues to inform regeneration studies today. Most importantly, Morgan argued that regeneration was a fundamental aspect of the growth process and therefore should be accounted for within developmental theory. Establishing important similarities between regeneration and development allowed Morgan to make the case that regeneration could act as a model of development. The nature of the relationship between embryogenesis and regeneration remains an active area of research. (shrink)

Abstract“Development” suggests that there is something that is developing, or changing over time. We can ask about temporal boundaries of that developmental process, asking when development begins or ends and whether it has defined stages along the way, for example. We can ask about spatial boundaries as well: where does the developing object start and end? For this article, I ask about the boundary definition of the developing organism in particular. What is an individual organism, and what defines it as (...) the same organism as it changes over time? In particular, how has this been answered historically: how have researchers described and explained what an individual developing organism is? This article explores ideas and approaches especially starting in the late 19th century, and in particular looks at the role of “organization.”. (shrink)

This paper has three principal aims: first, through a detailed analysis of the hypotheses and assumptions underlying Weismann’s and Morgan’s disagreement on the nature of animal regeneration, it seeks to readdress the imbalance in coverage of their discussion, providing, at the same time, a fascinating case-study for those interested in general issues related to controversies in science. Second, contrary to Morgan’s beliefs according to which Weismann employed a speculative and unempirical method of scientific investigation, the article shows that Weismann performed (...) experiments, made observations and proposed ‘undogmatic’ theories open to refutation. Third, through the reconstruction of Weismann’s and Morgan’s disagreement, this study illustrates how biology, during the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was undergoing important changes. I argue that this controversy clearly and convincingly demonstrates how some important epistemic assumptions became increasingly problematic for some members of the younger generations of biologists. At the end of my discussion I will also argue that Weismann and Morgan both had strong well-grounded arguments supporting their conclusions; for this reason I suggest a few factors (“taken-for-granted” beliefs or assumptions) that could explain why their disagreement was doomed to remain unresolved. In particular, I will analyze their diverse explicative interests, their different theoretical concerns and their distinct use of the available evidence. (shrink)

William Bateson has long occupied a controversial role in the history of biology at the turn of the twentieth century. For the most part, Bateson has been situated as the British translator of Mendel or as the outspoken antagonist of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson's biometrics program. Less has been made of Bateson's transition from embryologist to advocate for discontinuous variation, and the precise role of British and American influences in that transition, in the years leading up to (...) the publication of his massive Materials for the Study of Variation. In this paper, I first attempt to trace Bateson's development in his early career before turning to search for the development of the moniker "anti-Darwinist" that has been attached to Bateson in well-known histories of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. (shrink)

There is a rather striking video currently used in police training. A firearms officer is caught on video shooting an armed suspect. The officer then gives his account of what happened, and there is no suggestion that he is tying to fabricate evidence. He says that he shot the suspect once; his partner says that he fired two shots. On the video we see four shots being deliberately fired. Memory, it seems, is an unreliable witness in situations of stress.

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, entitled, Truth and Progress,.