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Interactions Among Theory, Experiment, and Technology in Molecular Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Kenneth F. Schaffner
Kenneth F. Schaffner*
Affiliation:
George Washington University
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Extract

In this paper, I revisit a problem in immunology and molecular genetics that I had first tried to understand some philosophical implications of over twenty years ago. At that time, some immunologists such as Mel Cohn at the Salk Institute, referred to it as the GOD problem, which was the acronym for Generator Of Diversity (also see Cohn's more recent discussion in his 1994, 41-48). In the early 1970s there were three or four different theories that had been proposed to account for the way in which antibody diversity is generated and considerable argument among the proponents of the different approaches to the problem (see Cohn, 1994). In 1971-72 I attempted to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the competing theories of antibody diversity from the perspective of a “logic of comparative theory evaluation” that had seemed to work reasonably well in physics (Schaffner, 1970), and I drafted an essay that ultimately sided with one of those theories (somatic mutation).

Type
Part VI. Search Heuristics, Experimentation, and Technology in Molecular and Cell Biology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 192 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I would like to express my gratitude to Drs. Philip Leder and Susumu Tonegawa for providing copies of their reprints. Partially supported by the National Science Foundation's Studies in Science, Technology, and Society Program. This paper is a short version of a much more detailed chapter in an in-progress book on theory structure and research strategies in molecular biology. Due to stringent space considerations, historical references have had to be kept to an absolute minimum, but a full bibliography is available from the author on request.

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