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  • Immunology: The Making of a Modern Science
  • Anne Marie Moulin
Richard B. Gallagher, Jean Gilder, G. J. V. Nossal, and Gaetano Salvatore, eds. Immunology: The Making of a Modern Science. London: Academic Press, 1995. viii + 246 pp. Ill. $27.50.

This book is the result of a meeting in 1991 on the history of immunology, where biologists and historians discussed and debated their respective methods and results. It is perhaps regrettable that the book bears no trace of the discussions that took place then, and provides the reader with no clues for the methodological issues involved in making the history of a “modern science.” But once the principle of a book written exclusively by scientists (with the notable exception of Arthur Silverstein, who is also the author of an authoritative History of Immunology [1989]) has been accepted, it must be stressed that this is an interesting collection of reminiscences by immunologists who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge and to the completion of the present theoretical framework of the discipline, such as the selective theory of antibody formation (still unchallenged) or the B-T duality in the immune system.

The volume opens with Arthur Silverstein, who sets the stage for the development of post-World War II immunology. Using Ludwik Fleck’s notion of DenkKollectiv, he summarizes the main features of its theoretical framework, starting with the rise of cellular immunology and the selection theory for antibody formation. The subsequent contributors, including younger ones who grew up in the era of molecular biology, share more or less the same interpretive knowledge of the immune system. Echoing the late Niels K. Jerne’s favorite sentence, one of the book’s editors, Gustav Nossal (director of one of the strongholds of immunology in Melbourne, Australia), agrees that it is difficult, if it is even possible, to “put oneself back into the mental framework” of the past and to escape the dominant dogmas of the present time (p. 39). Some chapters, to be true, deal with questions recurring throughout the history of immunology, but what is the nature of the link between Ehrlich’s turn-of-the-century horror autotoxicus and autoimmunity studies in the 1960s?

The book does not progress along a predetermined path, since each chapter was independently written in a personal way. The texts reveal as much by their [End Page 817] emphases as by their omissions, though both may be elusive for the lay reader. In particular, the historical records tend to be organized differently according to the social recognition of the author’s priority in the field. Jacques Miller’s chapter on the thymus is particularly interesting in this respect: he explains how he developed his idea of the role of the thymus in reaction to people who believed that it had no immunological function (and maybe no function at all), and his idea of the duality of the immune system against Gowans’s conviction that the lymphocyte was the omnicompetent or omnipotent cell.

Included in the book are many personal and often lively accounts, such as Peter Gorer’s picture by Georges and Eva Klein. The reader is introduced to a community with growing self-consciousness, divided into many subgroups such as the “tumour people,” the “virus people,” and so forth, pursuing parallel studies and exchanging material and ideas. Tumor immunology and transplantation studies offer interesting examples of both converging and conflicting endeavors, even if in retrospect the contributions from different fields are ultimately integrated into a unique pathway of discovery. Historians of science will find suggestive examples of the mistakes and uncertainties that made this pathway fascinatingly winding in reality. It would have been interesting to hear more about the failures and the tribulations of elusive entities such as suppressor factors, or even the history of suppressor cells.

From an epistemological viewpoint, it is interesting to have Nossal explain how his work was oriented by the urge to demonstrate the “one cell-one antibody” theory, which stated that no cell displayed a double specificity, and how this line was dropped after the general acceptance of the clonal selection theory—confirming the psychological discontinuity of “scientific revolutions.” It is also interesting...

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