ABSTRACT
The foundations of my own revisionist ideas about immunity originated both in my laboratory investigations and through philosophical affinity with Metchnikoff’s vision of biological functions. He forged his theory in response to a philosophy of science that dates to the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, Descartes had attempted to formalize reductive analysis as a scientific methodology, but not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century did reductionism achieve orthodoxy in the life sciences. Its declaration dates to a specific manifesto written by Hermann Helmholtz and fellow German physiologists, who, in 1847, declared that physiology, in principle, may be reduced to the same mechanical forces deciphered in physics and chemistry (Galaty 1974). It was an attack on vitalism (which assuredly deserved a quick burial), but reductionism was not restricted to only a strategic methodology for biology, but also included conceptual commitments that proved debilitating to its program. Once broken apart, a biological system’s array of separated elements could not be put back together without a model of their pre-disturbed state (Sarkar 1998).
