Microbe Hunters, Bright Side and Dark Side, Part I

Microbe Hunters was the title of a wonderfully successful science-popularzing book written by Paul de Kruif and published by Simon & Schuster in 1926.

The book is on its face a set of capsule biographies of prominent biologists from Leeuwenhook to Paul Ehrlich. Leeuwenhook invented the microscope: Ehrlich found a cure for syphilis in 1909.

But de Kruif had an underlying organizing principle by which he made his selection. The book was about the pragmatic successes of the germ theory of disease. Specifically, a 'typical' disease has one cause, and the cause is usually a germ. The way to cure (or immunize people from) a disease is to find the germ that causes it, then either(a) find a way to kill that microbe without doing damage to the surrounding tissue (a "magic bullet" as Ehrlich called such a discovery) or find a way to assist the body's own immune system in doing the same. Hence, the title of the book.

The only character in the book to get two chapters is Louis Pasteur. That happens because (like Grover Cleveland among American Presidents) Pasteur appears in two distinct capacities. In his early career he help destroy the idea of "spontaneous generation." One of de Kruif's key points is that the destruction of the idea of spontaneous generation was critical to the development of the germ theory. Our tiny biological enemies are not spontaneously generated within our bodies -- they must come into it from outside.

The de Kruif cuts away from Pasteur and has a chapter for Robert Koch, the German bacteriologist who identified the microbe responsible for anthrax. The work made Koch world famous, and eventually resulted in his receipt of a new invention called the Nobel Prize in Medicine. As de Kruif tells the story, this made Koch the world's most prominent "microbe hunter," a distinction that annoyed Pasteur, who had also been working on anthrax. So Pasteur, like Cleveland, took the title back, by his work on a rabies vaccine in the 1880s.

Microbe Hunters is an excitingly written book that creates much of its effect by giving us only one side of the story, what we might call its bright side. These are guys who were right, who pursued and in some way advanced the germ theory. But the germ theory isn't always the answer. Consider cancer. It is generally now understood that here is no cancer germ or virus. The causation of cancer is still an imperfectly understood matter, but there is likely a genetic disposition, in many cases, and many inorganic triggers such as tobacco smoke or even excessive exposure to sunlight, and there are lifestyle risks such as obesity.

Part of the dark side of the microbial or germ theory of disease may be that it has sometimes created a wild goose chase, sending scientists off in the wrong direction. Exactly that did happen within the history of cancer research, and I'll discuss it some more tomorrow.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog