ABSTRACT
No science has ever been done without a sustained and far-reaching imaginative effort. The images, myths, and patterns of ideas become, in due time, sedimented into coherent discourse, formulae, golden rules of work. A more recent study has addressed the emergence of immunology during Pasteur's time, in all its sociological complexity. Macrotheories are the large, imaginative canvases that constitute the conceptual scaffolding of a large portion of biology, and that appear only rarely in history. Microtheories are tolerated and respected among practicing biologists and are widely seen as very useful, although still not very many researchers spend enough time directly engaged in them. In practice, a scientist instead faces the reality of theory-laden facts and empirically laden thought at a smaller scale. Problems arise when a scientist is too lopsided into one or the other extreme, when experimentation becomes blind repetition of implicit theoretical reasoning or when theory becomes mere talk expressing individual whims.
