THE THERMODYNAMICS OF LIFE AND EXPERIMENTAL PHYSIOLOGY,1770-1880 (GERMANY,PHYSICS,REDUCTIONISM).
详细信息
- 作者：KREMER ; RICHARD LYNN.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：1984
- 毕业院校：Harvard University
- CBH：8503544
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：29713588
- Pages：530
文摘
This thesis examines the fate of a particular experimental tradition in physiology from 1770 to 1880,and reveals the difficulty of importing experimental techniques and concepts from the physical sciences into the life sciences. Based on a model of the organism as a "black box," opaque to observers except for the flow of materials or energy in and out,this tradition developed experimental means to study animal heat and muscle contraction. For these experimenters,to know was to measure； to explain meant to quantify. Yet by ignoring chemical transformations in the organism,this tradition ensured its demise. Originating in Santorios 16th-century "static" experiments on nutrition,the method was brought decisively into physiology by Lavoisier and Laplace. Their famous animal calorimetric experiments 1783) appeared to provide a definitive means to explore sources of animal heat. Yet alternative experimental approaches plus a discrepancy between theory and observation in their experiment increasingly challenged the "static" method. Despite efforts of the French Academie des Sciences 1821) to rescue Lavoisiers "static" method,it became apparent that knowledge of chemical processes occurring in the organism was required before anything could be said about the origin of animal heat--in direct contrast to the "black box" assumption. With the formulation of the law of energy conservation in the 1840s,the "static" method became "thermodynamic," i.e.,heat and work leaving the animal are balanced against the chemical "energy" entering the animal. Beginning with Liebig,Mayer,Matteucci,and Beclard,the thermodynamic method became the basis for studies of active muscles. In the 1860-70s,a major debate developed between the "research schools" of Heidenhain Breslau) and Fick Wurzburg) over how to apply the thermodynamic method to contracting muscles. Despite the construction of sensitive apparatus to measure minute amounts of heat and work produced by tiny frog muscles in vitro,these researchers ultimately could not identify the source of the power for the muscle. As in the "static" studies of animal heat,an impasse arose from the lack of knowledge of chemical processes within the "black box." By 1880,biochemical rather than thermodynamic techniques would provide the most useful tools for probing physiological functions.