Species and Specificity An Interpretation of the History of Immunology [Paperback]

An account of scientific disputes over the core problems of research and practice in immunology.In the first hundred years of its history, the problems of species and specificity were the core problems of research and practice in immunology. Professor Mazumdar recounts the scientific debates that have taken place over these problems among bacteriologists, immunologists, immunochemists and blood group geneticists.In the first hundred years of its history, the problems of species and specificity were the core problems of research and practice in immunology. Professor Mazumdar recounts the scientific debates that have taken place over these problems among bacteriologists, immunologists, immunochemists and blood group geneticists.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.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 Inheril$