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Metaphors and other slippery creatures

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KarlMatlin, JaneMaienschein and ManfredLaublicher (eds.), Visions of Cell Biology: Reflections Inspired by Cowdry's General Cytology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. 400. ISBN: 978-0-2265-2048-3. $135.00 (cloth)

AndrewReynolds, The Third Lens: Metaphor and the Creation of Modern Cell Biology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. 267. ISBN 978-0-2265-6312-1. $90.00 (cloth)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2019

James E. Strick*
Affiliation:
Franklin and Marshall College

Extract

What are cells? How are they related to each other and to the organism as a whole? These questions have exercised biology since Schleiden and Schwann (1838–1839) first proposed cells as the key units of structure and function of all living things. But how do we try to understand them? Through new technologies like the achromatic microscope and the electron microscope. But just as importantly, through the metaphors our culture has made available to biologists in different periods and places. These two new volumes provide interesting history and philosophy of the development of cell biology. Reynolds surveys the field's changing conceptual structure by examining the varied panoply of changing metaphors used to conceptualize and explain cells – from cells as empty boxes, as building blocks, to individual organisms, to chemical factories, and through many succeeding metaphors up to one with great currency today: cells as social creatures in communication with others in their community. There is some of this approach in the Visions edited collection as well. But this collection also includes rich material on the technologies used to visualize cells and their dialectical relationship with the epistemology of the emerging distinct discipline of cell biology. This volume centres on, but is not limited to, ‘reflections inspired by [E.V.] Cowdry's [1924 volume] General Cytology’; it benefits from a conference on the Cowdry volume as well as a 2011 Marine Biological Lab/Arizona State University workshop on the history of cell biology.

Type
Essay Review
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2019 

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References

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6 Ronald Canti, ‘Cultivation of living tissue, part 3’ (1933), at www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIhaaNeFgdE&t=48s, for example. For more on this see Stramer, Brian M. and Dunn, Graham A., ‘Cells on film: the past and future of cinemicroscopy’, Journal of Cell Science (2015) 128, pp. 913, doi:10.1242/jcs.165019CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. On the Lewis films see Landecker, Hannah, ‘The Lewis films: tissue culture and “living anatomy”, 1919–1940’, in Maienschein, Jane and Glitz, Marie (eds.), History of the Carnegie Institute Laboratory of Embryology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 117144Google Scholar; Landecker, , ‘Creeping, drinking, dying: the cinematic portal and the microscopic world of the twentieth-century cell’, Science in Context (2011) 24, pp. 381416CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Adrianus Pijper's films are at the American Society for Microbiology archives at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Catonsville, MD.

7 See, e.g., ‘Forbidden Fertilization’, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATQrxZSLia4.

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15 See e.g. E.F. Keller, ‘One woman and her theory’, New Scientist, 3 July 1986, pp. 46–50, esp. the section ‘A job for a woman’. Also Strick, James, ‘Exobiology at NASA: incubator for the Gaia and serial endosymbiosis theories’, in Clarke, Bruce (ed.), Earth, Life, and System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, pp. 80104, esp. 95–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.