A Physiologist Who Never Said Die

CONTROLLING LIFE Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology. Philip J. Pauly. Oxford University Press, New York, 1987. 252 pp. $24.95. Few scientists today would consider modeling their professional development on the life of Jacques Loeb (1859-1924). Despite considerable accomplishments, Loeb felt embattled for most of his career. As a German Jew, he was alienated from American academic and social circles, and on several occasions his religion served to limit and even deny him professional opportunities. His ideas were both admired and attacked, and he was repeatedly called upon to justify his more radical research. Loeb’s success with artificial parthenogenesis gained him world fame, but also created suspicions that he was a nut or a fraud. Loeb trained as a physiologist at a time when physiology was linked with medicine intellectually as well as institutionally. He believed that the preoccupation with health and disease was too confining and boring, and thus sought to fashion a more experimental approach to examining biological phenomena. Under the influence of physiologist Friedrich Goltz, plant physiologist Julian Sacha and physicist Ernst Mach, Loeb came to believe in what author Philip Pauly calls “the engineering standpoint” in biological investigation. Rather than framing questions around particular and clinically defined problems, Loeb sought to manipulate organisms actively within an open-ended research program, to control and even create life. At the University of Chicago in 1892 Loeb discovered his growing distaste for the predominant intellectual preoccupation of Chicago academics—progressive evolutionism, a broadly conceived research program that viewed evolution as goal-directed and orderly, in both an organismic and social context. For evolutionary biologists, this vision led to an emphasis on developmental mechanics. To Loeb, such an approach smacked of metaphysics; at best it dwelled on the trivial, at worst on the unknowable. Loeb turned his attention to more mechanistic and reductionist approaches to animal behavior. Physical chemistry became a tool in shaping biological phenomena his “invention” of artificial parthenogenesis with sea urchins was perhaps his most dramatic statement regarding the potential of biological engineering. Loeb’s iconoclastic status within the biological community was at once his salvation and his undoing. In his major professional positions, he was hired as much for his bold pronouncements as for his research results. Loeb was given the opportunity to develop his ideas without constraints, but to the dismay of many he developed no distinct research program for others to follow, and no generation of young scientists committed to his approach. When one considers the unsettling and unsatisfying niche Loeb carved for himself, it is ironic that he has come to symbolize the archetypical scientist who follows his own ideas and intuitions regardless of what the establishment thinks. Many other life scientists occupy a larger place in history for far less visionary works. Indeed, it seems that history is much more attentive to those who organized, patronized, taught and pronounced on scientific matters than those who, less interested in the social side of things, simply did their work. Pauly does a masterful job of presenting Loeb in his scientific and cultural context. He does not fall into the biographical trap of enshrining his subject or inflating his importance and influence, and is wise in allowing the ambiguities and ambivalences to stand without taming, and thus distorting, the details My only criticism relates to the subtitle of the book. Pauly seems unaware that there really was an engineering ideal stemming from the professionalizing rhetoric of engineers eager to apply their particular scientific knowledge to wider problems. While Pauly uses the term metaphorically, it seems likely that biologists appropriated more than metaphor in fashioning a reductionist research program. This is not to fault Pauly, but rather to suggest a more direct intellectual relationship between engineering and biology. The book is a model of scholarly integrity and intuition, and will inspire historians and biologists alike. Fitzgerald is assistant professor of history of science at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.

A Physiologist Who Never Said Die

CONTROLLING LIFE

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