“The End is Near!”: The Phenomenon of the Declaration of Closure in a Discipline

Bush Vannevar , Science: The endless frontier (Washington, D.C., 1950). Dan Kevles has described the political background and further political consequences of Bush's position in “The National Science Foundation and the debate over postwar research policy, 1942–1945”, Isis, lxviii (1977), 5–26.

However, another elder statesman of science, AAAS President Bentley Glass, would contradict Bush's view in an essay entitled “Science: Endless horizon or golden age?”, Science, clxxi (1971), 23–29. Glass would further support the view that science was approaching an end by suggesting that the rate of new discoveries in biology was lagging behind the exponential increase in investigators and financial support, in “Milestones and rates of growth in the development of biology”, Quarterly review of biology, liv (1979), 31–53.

A similar optimism about the limitless future of science has recently been advanced by the former editor of Nature, Maddox John Sir , in What remains to be discovered: Mapping the secrets of the universe, the origins of life, and the future of the human race (New York, 1998). Maddox would rather concentrate on what we do not yet know than on what we already know.

de Solla Price Derek J. , Little science, big science (New York, 1963); see also Price , Science since Babylon (New Haven, 1975).

Horgan John , The end of science (New York, 1997). Horgan makes the point that when we “know it all”, science will not end but rather enter a “postempirical” stage of untestable theories (such as quantum cosmology), populated as much by poets as by scientists. This, he suggests, is what such creative and ambitious persons as Stephen Hawking and other cosmologists are engaged in. Horgan calls it “ironic science”. Horgan Maddox , op. cit. (ref. 3) have recently debated the issue hotly in several venues; see, e.g., The New York Times, 10 Nov. 1998, p. D5.

Hewitt Martin , Cosmic discovery (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). In his Science since Babylon (ref. 4) Derek Price, while not calling for an end of science, had earlier predicted an approaching asymptote in the scientific enterprise based upon purely demographic and financial considerations. The logarithmic expansion experienced since the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 could not continue unabated, otherwise the entire population (and the entire national budget) would soon be devoted to scientific pursuits.

Koshland Daniel E. Jr (Science, cclxvii (1995), 1575) and many others have repeated this story, but Eber Jeffery has shown in “Nothing left to invent” ( Journal of the Patent Office Society , July 1940, 479–81) that the account is not precise. The Patent Office head, Henry Ellsworth, actually said in Congressional testimony, “The advancement in the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end”, quoted by Horgan, End of science (ref. 5), 20–21.

Emil du Bois-Reymond speculated as early as the 1870s on the limits of science, “Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens”, in Reden von Emil Du Bois-Reymond (Leipzig, 1912), i, 441–73. He later suggested that some of Nature's most fundamental problems were in fact insoluble, in “Die Sieben Welträtsel”, Reden, ii, 65–98.

Lindley David , The end of physics: The myth of a unified theory (New York, 1993).

The notion of a grand unifying theory in physics is reminiscent of the implication in Wilson's Edward O. Sociobiology: The new synthesis (Cambridge, Mass. 1975) that a grand unifying principle relating human behaviour to evolutionary/biological scientific rules might be possible. More recently, however, Wilson has admitted that a complete theory in this area might not be attainable (quoted in Horgan , End of science (ref. 5), 148).

In this connection, see the Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a final theory (New York, 1994).

Lindley , End of physics (ref. 9), 255. Entering variously into this position are Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of 1927 (in which both the precise position and momentum of a particle cannot both be known simultaneously), and Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem of 1931 (which holds that any system of axioms must be incomplete, since it will produce statements that cannot be either proved or disproved with those axioms). This view has been advanced more recently by John Barrow in Impossibility: The limits of science and the science of limits (New York, 1998). Barrow suggests that when science ages, it becomes increasingly concerned with “… things that they cannot predict, observations which cannot be made, [and] statements whose truth they can neither confirm nor deny”.

Medawar Peter B. , The limits of science (New York, 1984).

Horgan (End of science (ref. 5), 259) calls Medawar's book “… for the most part regurgitated Popperisms”. He describes Medawar's proposition as “a vacuous tautology”.

Just as Noam Chomsky suggests that our brain hardware imposes restrictions on the form of our language, so the historian Bury J. B. in The idea of progress: An inquiry into its origins and growth (London, 1932), 4, raises the possibility that we shall “soon reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human intellect is unqualified to pass”.

Rescher Nicholas , Scientific progress (Oxford, 1978), 7–15. Rescher points out (pp. 243–7) that some questions are not only unanswerable but actually unaskable at a given time, but concludes that every question can ultimately be asked and eventually answered. He terms the other alternatives “Nature Exhaustion … limited by the inherent finitude of nature” and “Capacity Exhaustion … limited by the inherent finitude of man”.

Lindley , End of physics (ref. 9), 113. See also Glass , op. cit. (ref. 2) and Price , opera cit. (ref. 4). Many in the physics community felt betrayed by the American Congress when it cancelled the expensive superconducting supercollider.

See Temkin Owsei , Galenism: Rise and decline of a medical philosophy (Ithaca, 1973), 32–34. This is not unlike the commentaries of the Talmud, wherein wise men sought to interpret the depth of meaning in the words of God. There is perhaps a subtle difference between these acknowledgments of closure and those discussed elsewhere in this paper. Owsei Temkin points out (personal communication, 1998) that during the Middle Ages, the all-important Christian Bible was considered to represent unassailable truths that were revealed at the beginning, rather than the modern view of (scientific) truths, only attained at the end. He suggested to me that the truths of Aristotle and Hippocrates might have been viewed similarly by the medieval mind. Indeed, Paracelsus was called by some Lutherus medicorum for having questioned the entire medical “religion” of the times.

The literature on whether or not there was a scientific revolution beginning in the sixteenth century is overwhelming. I cite only Steven Shapin's The scientific revolution (Chicago, 1996), which begins: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.”.

Frontinus Sextus Julius , Strategematicon [The stratagems], cited in James P. Thorpe N. , Ancient inventions (New York, 1994), 207–8.

Quoted in Scientific American, November 1998, 14.

Feynman Richard Leighton R. B. Sands M. (eds), The Feynman Lectures on physics (Reading, Mass., 1963), 40–49. But Feynman would later say that things were likely to go downhill after the present age ( Feynman Richard , The character of physical law (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 172).

Bork Alfred , “The fourth dimension in nineteenth century physics”, Isis, lv (1964), 326–38, p. 338.

Bush Stephen , “Thermodynamics and history”, The graduate journal, vii (1967), 477–565.

Badash Lawrence , “The completeness of 19th century science”, Isis, lxiii (1972), 48–58.

If the sentiment is not always so extreme as après moi le déluge, it may often take the more moderate form, après moi le déclin.

In his discussion of the reasons for the movement of physicists into postwar biomedical research, Nicolas Rasmussen adds the pull of interesting biological problems to the push of social factors (such as revulsion from the atom bomb); see his “The mid-century biophysics bubble: Hiroshima and the biological revolution in America, revisited”, History of science, xxxv (1997), 245–93.

Bernal J. D. , The extension of man: A history of physics before 1900 (London, 1972).

Singer Charles (eds), A history of technology, v: The late 19th century (Oxford, 1958). Not only did wonderful new products of science emerge, but the same progress resulted also in marked declines in their prices, making them more generally available to the public; see, for example, Chandler Alfred D. Jr , “Fin de siècle: Industrial transformation”, in Teich Mikuláš Porter Roy (eds), Fin de siècle and its legacy (Cambridge, 1990), 28–41.

Michelson A. A. , speech at the dedication of the University of Chicago's Ryerson Physical Laboratory, quoted in part in Physics today, April 1968, 9, and in Horgan , End of science (ref. 5), 19.

This quotation actually appears in Michelson's speech (ref. 30), and purports to quote “an eminent physicist”. Robert Milliken suggested that Michelson meant Lord Kelvin, and it has often been so attributed. However, as Horgan points out in End of science (ref. 5), 19, historians have yet to substantiate this attribution.

Enrico Fermi is reported to have said, about the theoretically confusing large numbers of elementary particles being described at the time, “if I could remember the names of all these particles, I would have been a botanist”. This is quoted in Lindley , End of physics (ref. 9), 113.

Hawking Stephen , “Is the end of theoretical physics in sight?”. A condensed version was published in Physics bulletin, January 1981, 15–17.

In 1994, Hawking would admit that after all, physicists might never achieve a final theory (Science watch, September 1994), quoted by Lindley , End of physics (ref. 9), 211ff.

Virchow Rudolf , Die Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begründung auf physiologische und pathologische Gewebelehre (Berlin, 1858); English edition, Cellular pathology (New York, 1971).

Virchow Rudolph , “Standpoints in scientific medicine”, transl. by Rather L. J. , Bulletin of the history of medicine , xxx (1956), 436–49. In an essay with the same title written some 30 years later ( ibid. , 537–43), Virchow had outlined many of the problems posed in pathology, which his Cellular pathology had presumably solved.

Metchnikoff Ilya , “Über eine Sprosspilzkrankheit der Daphnien: Beitrag zur Lehre über den Kampf der Phagocyten gegen Krankheitserreger”, Virchows Archiv, xcvi (1884), 177–94.

See, for example, Tauber Alfred Chernyak Leon , Metchnikoff and the origins of immunology: From metaphor to theory (New York, 1991); Tauber Alfred , The immune self: Theory or metaphor? (New York, 1994).

Metchnikoff Elie , Leçons sur la pathologie comparée de V inflammation (Paris, 1891); English translation, Lectures on the comparative pathology of inflammation (London, 1893; reprinted New York, 1968).

Metchnikoff Elie , L'immunité dans les maladies infectieuses (Paris, 1901); English translation, Immunity in the infectious diseases (Cambridge, 1905; reprinted New York, 1968).

Metchnikoff's cells lost out to Behring's and Ehrlich's humoral antibodies. See Silverstein Arthur M. , “Cellular versus humoral immunity: Determinants and consequences of an epic 19th century battle”, Cellular immunology, xlviii (1979), 208–21.

Quoted in Haeger K. , The illustrated history of surgery (New York, 1988), 223.

See Wangensteen O. H. Wangensteen S. D. , The rise of surgery (Minneapolis, 1978), 13.

Stent Gunther S. , The coming of the golden age: A view of the end of progress (New York, 1969).

One wonders whether Stent, in the naming of the “dogmatic period”, perhaps had in mind the contemporary overriding influence of Francis Crick's Central dogma of molecular genetics.

Kuhn Thomas , The structure of scientific revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1970).

This pointed was made also by Rollin Hotchkiss in his review of Stent's book, Science, clxix (1970), 664–6.

Stent Gunther S. , The paradoxes of progress (San Francisco, 1978), 27.

Behring Emil Kitasato Shibasaburo , “Über das Zustandekommen der Diphtherie-Immunität und der Tetanus-Immunität bei Thieren”, Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift, xvi (1890), 1113.

Ehrlich Paul , “Die Wertbemessung des Diphtherieheilserums und deren theoretische Grundlagen”, Klinische Jahrbuch, vi (1897/98), 299–326; English translation in Collected papers of Paul Ehrlich (London and New York, 1956–60), ii, 107–25.

This transition is described in Silverstein Arthur M. , “The dynamics of conceptual change in twentieth century immunology”, Cellular immunology, cxxxii (1991), 515–31.

Clapesattle H. , Dr. Webb of Colorado Springs (Boulder, Colorado, 1984), 401.

Jerne Niels , “The natural selection theory of antibody formation”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, xli (1955), 849–57, p. 849.

Burnet F. M. , “A modification of Jerne's theory of antibody production using the concept of clonal selection”, Australian journal of science, xx (1957), 67–69. See also Burnet F. M. , The clonal selection theory of antibody formation (Cambridge, 1959) and his Lecture Nobel Prize , “The immunological recognition of self”, Nobel lectures: Physiology and medicine, iii (Amsterdam, 1964), 689–701, p. 689.

This declaration was made by Burnet at the international symposium on “Molecular and cellular aspects of antibody formation” held in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1964, attended by this author.

Jerne Niels K. , “Summary: Waiting for the end”, in Antibodies: Cold Spring Harbor symposium on quantitative biology, xxxii (1967), 591–603, p. 601.

Jerne Niels K. , “The complete solution of immunology”, Australian annals of medicine, xviii (1969), 345–8, p. 347.

See Silverstein , “Dynamics” (ref. 51). See also Silverstein Arthur M. , A history of immunology (New York, 1989); Moulin Anne-Marie , Le dernier langage de la medicine: Histoire de l'immunologie de Pasteur au Sida (Paris, 1991).

The numerous aspects of recent developments in immunology are most comprehensively summarized in Paul William E. (ed.), Fundamental immunology, 4th edn (New York, 1998).

See, e.g., Bayler Richard H. , “From positivism to organism: Pascual Jordan's interpretation of modern physics in cultural context”, Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1994.

Jordan Pascual , “Heuristische Theorie der Immunisierungs- und Anaphylaxie-Erscheinungen”, Zeitschrift für Immunitätsforschung, xcvii (1940), 330–44.

This was the “instructive” theory of antibody formation, advanced most notably by Breinl F. Haurowitz F. (“Chemische Untersuchung des Präzipitates aus Hämoglobin und Anti-hämoglobin Serum und Bemerkungen über die Natur der Antikörper”, Hoppe-Seylers Zeitschrift für physiologische Chemie, cxcii (1930), 45–57), later modified by Linus Pauling, in “A theory of the structure and process of formation of antibodies”, Journal of the American Chemical Society, lxii (1940), 2643–57. Here, antigen was assumed to impress its specificity by instructing changes on the nascent antibody molecule.

Pauling Linus Delbrück Max , “The nature of the intermolecular forces operative in biological processes”, Science, xcii (1940), 77–79.

Kay Lily , “Conceptual models and analytical tools: The biology of physicist Max Delbrück”, Journal of the history of biology, xviii (1985), 207–46.

For a discussion of the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the movement of physical scientists into biology, see Kohler Robert E. , “Warren Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation program in molecular biology: A case study in the management of science”, in Reingold N. (ed.), The sciences in the American context (Washington, D.C., 1979), 249–94. See also Abir-Am Pnina , “The discourse of physical power and biological knowledge in the 1930′s: A reappraisal of the Rockefeller Foundation's ‘policy’ in molecular biology”, Social studies of science, xii (1982), 341–82.

See Kay Lily E. , “The secret of life: Niels Bohr's influence on the biology program of Max Delbrück”, Rivista di storia della scienza, ii (1985), 487–510. See also Olby Robert , The path to the double helix (London, 1974); Judson Horace Freeland , The eighth day of creation (New York, 1979); and Kay Lily E. , The molecular vision of life (New York, 1993).

Kay , “Conceptual models” (ref. 64), 245.

It will be recalled that Delbrück never gave up considering himself a physicist. Thus, in 1949 he made a speech entitled “A physicist looks at biology”, reprinted in Cairns J. Stent G. Watson J. (eds), Phage and the origins of molecular biology (New York, 1966), 9–22, p. 22. He was still a physicist when later he wrote “A physicist's renewed look at biology: Twenty years later”, Science, clxviii (1970), 1312–15.

Pauling published his trail-blazing ideas first in 1931, “The nature of the chemical bond: Application of the results obtained from the quantum mechanics and from a theory of paramagnetic susceptibility to the structure of molecules”, Journal of the American Chemical Society, liii (1931), 1367–400. He extended and formalized the approach in The nature of the chemical bond (Ithaca, 1939).

Pauling , op. cit. (ref. 62).

Pauling Linus , “Sickle cell anemia, a molecular disease”, Science, cx (1949), 64–66.

Pauling Linus Corey Robert Bransom H.R. , “The structure of proteins: Two hydrogen-bonded helical configurations of the polypeptide chain”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, xxxvii (1951), 205–11.

Judson , The eighth day (ref. 66), 152ff.

See Serafini Anthony , Linus Pauling: A man and his science (New York, 1989).

Hinshelwood Cyril , Kinetics of chemical change in gaseous systems (Oxford, 1926); Hinshelwood Cyril Williamson A. T. , The reaction between hydrogen and oxygen (Oxford, 1934).

Hinshelwood Cyril , The chemical kinetics of the bacterial cell (Oxford, 1946); Hinshelwood Cyril Dean A. C. R. , Growth, function, and regulation in bacterial cells (Basel, 1966).

See Lanouette W. , Genius in the shadows: A biography of Leo Szilard (New York, 1992).

Szilard Leo , “The molecular basis of antibody formation”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, xlvi (1960), 293–302.

Crick Francis , What mad pursuits: A personal view of scientific discovery (New York, 1988), 143ff.

Edelman Gerald , “The covalent structure of an entire gamma G immunoglobulin molecule”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lxiii (1969), 78–85.

Edelman may have been one whose shift to a new field was not done quietly. He is quoted in a New York Times magazine cover story in 1988 (cited by Horgan , End of science (ref. 5), 165) as suggesting that his Nobel-prize winning work on the structure of the antibody molecule had “solved” immunology. “Before I came to it, there was darkness — Afterwards there was light.”.

See Edelman Gerald , “CAMS and Igs: Cell adhesion and the evolutionary origins of immunity”, Immunological reviews, c (1987), 11–45, p. 11; Edelman Gerald Thiery Jean-Paul (eds), The cell in contact: Adhesions and junctions as morphogenetic determinants (New York, 1985).

Edelman Gerald , Neural Darwinism: The theory of neuronal group selection (New York, 1987).

Ehrlich , op. cit. (ref. 50).

Ehrlich's activities in these different fields are variously described in the numerous biographies; see, for example that by his secretary Marquardt Martha , Paul Ehrlich (London, 1949); by his colleague Lazarus A. , Paul Ehrlich (Vienna, 1922); by Heinrich Satter to accompany the 1962 Paul Ehrlich Prize, Paul Ehrlich: Begründer der modernen Chemotherapie (Munich, 1962); and by Bäumler Ernst , Paul Ehrlich, scientist for life (New York, 1984). The best review of the full scope of Ehrlich's science will be found in the festschrift prepared in honour of his sixtieth birthday, Paul Ehrlich: Eine Darstellung seines wissenschaftlichen Wirkens (Jena, 1914).

For a description of several of these scientific disputes involving Ehrlich, and of their heuristic value, see Silverstein , History of immunology (ref. 82), 99ff, and Silverstein Arthur M. , “The Pasteur Institute and the advent of immunology: The great immunological debates”, in Cazenave P.-A. Talwar G. P. (eds), Immunology: Pasteur's heritage (New Delhi, 1991), 11–20. Among the Ehrlich papers in the Rockefeller University Archives Center at North Tarrytown, New York (ref. no. 650Eh89, Box 3) is a folder from Ehrlich's Frankfurt Institute labelled “Polemics and Disputes”.

In a letter to Dr Clemens dated 15 Nov. 1899 (Rockefeller Archives Center Ehrlich Collection, Box 6, Copirbuch #4, pp. 59–60), Ehrlich complains that his preoccupation with Immunitätszauber keeps him from his other interests.

Gaffky Georg , “Einleitender Überblick (Immunitätsforschung)” in the festschrift Paul Ehrlich (ref. 85), 129–33, p. 131.

See the debate between Bush , op. cit. (ref. 24) and Badash , op. cit. (ref. 25).

Anderson Warwick Jackson Myles Rosenkrantz Barbara G. , “Toward an unnatural history of immunology”, Journal of the history of biology, xxvii (1994), 575–94.

See, for example, Hobsbawm Eric Ranger Terence (eds), The invention of tradition (Cambridge, 1983).

Anderson , “Unnatural history” (ref. 90), 579. It is curious that the authors repeatedly put “immunology” in quotation marks as though the field either does not really exist, or perhaps cannot be readily defined.

The authors seem to imply also that the Jerne-Burnet ‘mythical construct’ is somehow responsible for a history of immunology that has neglected the social, ethnological, technological, and institutional components so important for a full picture of the history of a field. This is hardly fair: Historical interest in the field is still only quite recent, and apart from a few intellectual histories, these other approaches have scarcely yet been broached.

The internet source consulted during October 1998 was Amazon.com. There are not a few pertinent titles starting with The death of …, but this list is more devoted to detective novels than to serious predictions of the imminent demise of a discipline.

Fukuyama Francis , The end of history (New York, 1993). Fukuyama suggests that “liberal democracy may constitute the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution” (p. xi). Thus, echoing Horgan and Stent, he proposes that “… there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled” (p. xii).

Bell Daniel , The end of ideology (New York, 1962).

McKibben Bill , The end of nature (New York, 1990).

Madrick Jeffrey , The end of affluence (New York, 1997).

Noever Peter (ed.), The end of architecture (New York, 1997).

Ohmae Kenichi , The end of the nation state (New York, 1995).