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John C. Eccles' Conversion and the Meaning of 'Authority'

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John C. Eccles' Conversion and the Meaning of 'Authority' Chapter 7 John C. Eccles’ Conversion and the Meaning of ‘Authority’ Fabio De Sio, Nils Hansson and Ulrich Koppitz Robert K. Merton’s tentative taxonomy of the ‘instructively ambiguous’ catego- ries of ‘excellence’ and ‘recognition’ features the Nobel Prize as an example of the couple ‘excellence as performance/recognition as honorific’.1 In this con- nection, Merton raises the problem of what the performance to be recognised should look like. In the sciences, he concludes, the single achievement (as op- posed to ‘life-work’2) seems to be the standard, although what this means is far from self-evident. Alfred Nobel’s three famous criteria for a prize-worthy achievement (‘re- cency’, ‘benefit to mankind’ and ‘discovery’) have equally proven difficult to handle, requiring progressive adjustments (see the Introduction to this vol- ume). In situations of real-life complexity, Merton’s taxonomy of ‘recognition’ and ‘excellence as performance’ shows its analytical limit, as do Nobel’s crite- ria. Even in early, apparently simple, cases of undivided awards, the stumbling block of the ‘individual discovery’ had made itself perspicuous, as shown by the lengthy debate over Ivan Pavlov’s3 or Paul Ehrlich’s award,4 demonstrating how problematic the ‘snapshot’ conception of discovery can be. One is here reminded of Roland Barthes’ concept of ‘punctum’,5 ‘[the] element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces [us]’. The ‘punctum’ is what commands our attention and makes us notice an image. This event, however, can only be perceived as such within the less perspicuous framework of an educated and idiosyncratic approach, which he calls ‘studium’, and is the ‘application to a thing […] a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, but without special acuity’.6 Transposed to the problem at hand, the ‘punctum’ can be abruptly translated as ‘(beneficial) discovery’, whereas ‘studium’ be- comes the set of conditions that makes the achievement recognised as a great 1 Merton 1973. 2 Merton 1973, 433. 3 Todes 2002, Chapter 10. 4 Hüntelmann 2018. 5 Barthes 1981, 26. 6 Barthes 1981, 26. © fabio de sio, nils hansson and ulrich koppitz, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/97890044064��_009 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms ofFabio the cc-by-nc-ndDe Sio, Nils Hansson, 4.0 License. and Ulrich Koppitz - 9789004406421 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 01:54:05PM via free access <UN> 144 De Sio, Hansson and Koppitz contribution to a specific field. Since it provides the background for our punc- tual awareness of the event, the ‘studium’ requires some effort to be acknowl- edged at all. In what follows, we will attempt the analysis of one famous Nobel laureate from a perspective complementary to that of the binomial excellence/recogni- tion, namely, that of ‘authority’. Although no less ambiguous than the couple it is intended to replace, the concept we propose is just as productive: it allows to consider the co-evolution of discovery7 (individual level) and honorific recog- nition (community), their articulation, the process of maturation of both the knowledge claims and technical innovations that are considered ‘discoveries’, and the general and local criteria that sanction them as such. In other words, we will try in this case to show the inevitable interdependence of ‘punctum’ and ‘studium’. The case is the 1963 award given to the Australian physiologist John C. Eccles (1903–1997), with Alan L. Hodgkin and Andrew F. Huxley, ‘for their discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms involved in excitation and inhibition in the peripheral and central portions of the nerve cell membrane’. The focus will be on Eccles, the first in the official list of the awardees, a towering figure in the history of neurophysiology and the neurosciences.8 Conversion and the Creation of Authority Eccles’ scientific upbringing took place between 1927 and 1937, in a Mecca of physiological science, the Oxford laboratory of Charles Scott Sherrington, where he directly participated in the completion and refinement of his mas- ter’s life-work on spinal reflexes, rewarded with a Nobel Prize in 1932. In the eyes of his pupil, the old ‘figurehead’ of British science9 was an authority in every sense, a model he tried to follow and match, also beyond the labora- tory walls. Eccles borrowed the master’s experimental approach, integrative outlook,10 and focus on inhibition as a bona fide physiological mechanism.11 7 Throughout the present chapter, we will use ‘discovery’ as a synonym of ‘excellence as performance’ in Merton’s sense. 8 Curtis and Andersen 2001. 9 Smith 2000; see also Smith 1992; Smith 2001; Smith 2003. 10 on which see Sherrington 1906. 11 On the debate over the statute of inhibition (mechanism vs. simple physical consequence of the refractory period after discharge) see Granit 1961, Chapter iv; Jacobson 1993, Chap- ter 4; Smith 1992, Chapter 5. Fabio De Sio, Nils Hansson, and Ulrich Koppitz - 9789004406421 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 01:54:05PM via free access <UN> John C. Eccles’ Conversion and the Meaning of ‘Authority’ 145 Not least, he fashioned himself as an apostle of Sherrington’s Cartesian- dualistic view of man.12 As a consequence of his collaboration with Sherrington, in a series of studies on the summation of impulses at the synapse in the early 1930s, Eccles became involved13 in one of the harshest controversies in the history of neurophysiol- ogy: the dispute over the nature (chemical or electrical) of synaptic transmis- sion, aka ‘the war of the soups and the sparks’.14 The hypothesis, championed since the 1910s by some pharmacologists, that acetylcholine played a central role in the transmission of the nerve impulse at every level (neuromyal junc- tion and spinal neurones) had met fierce resistance from ‘proper’ neurophysi- ologists, who favoured a physical (electrical) interpretation in analogy with the mechanism of conduction along the axon. Eccles quickly rose to the leadership of the electrical side. His knowledge of the physiology of reflexes, experimental ingenuity and pugnacity made him, in the words of a witness, ‘the one to whom all the non-believers made reference when they had run out of arguments’.15 He approached the problem at the level of the neuromuscular junction, sensory ganglia and motor cells, piling a mountain of evidence against a hypothesis which he considered insufficient to account for the essential quantitative details (speed, summative character) of synaptic transmission. The main theatre of the dispute were the meetings of the Physiological Society, where he staged memorable fights with the lead- ing ‘chemagonist’16 and future Nobel laureate (1936) Henry H. Dale and associ- ates, often to the embarrassment of the session chairs. The personal relations among the fighters, however, and especially those between Eccles and Dale, were not in the least harmed, as is testified by the eyewitness Bernhard Katz (1996) and the correspondence among the protagonists (fraught with military metaphors).17 Dale and his group privately and publicly acknowledged the beneficial effect of Eccles’ criticism (forcing them to refine experimentation and theory to meet the standards of the neurophysiologists), as well as the balance and measure he displayed in the occasional role of the reviewer.18 12 Sherrington 1938; but see on this Smith 2000; De Sio 2018. 13 Curtis and Andersen 2001. 14 Valenstein 2002; Valenstein 2006. 15 Bacq 1974, 62; For a full history of the controversy see Valenstein 2006; Shepherd 2009; Bennett 2001; Borck 2017. 16 ‘Chemagonists’ was the collective name coined by Walter Cannon (1939) for the support- ers of chemical transmission. Their opponents he called ‘electragonists’. 17 Partly published in Eccles 1976; Eccles 1982; Girolami et al. 1994; two letters also in Freund et al. 2011. 18 See Dale to Eccles 29/1/37, Eccles Archives, Medizingeschichte Düsseldorf (eamd) 2NZ-2023. Fabio De Sio, Nils Hansson, and Ulrich Koppitz - 9789004406421 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 01:54:05PM via free access <UN> 146 De Sio, Hansson and Koppitz Nevertheless, Eccles’ ‘super aggressive personality’19 did not fit the Oxonian style and raised more than an eyebrow. When Sherrington retired in 1936, his pupil’s aspirations to succession were thwarted, leaving him no choice but to accept a research position in his native Australia. The rest of the story has been recounted several times by the protagonist,20 echoed by pupils and ha- giographers, finally making its way into historiography. It is a story of endless meandering (from Sydney to Dunedin, New Zealand and back to Canberra), isolation, and frustration, but also of great achievement against all odds, of an astonishing inversion of the centre-periphery power relations in wartime, and of a mighty new school of neurophysiology being born down under.21 Most perspicuously, however, it is a story of conversions. At a most delicate juncture in his career, as the electrical theory of synaptic transmission was progressively buried under a snowfall of contrary evidence,22 Eccles came under the spell of the philosopher Karl Popper. According to his own, oft-repeated account23 Popper liberated him from the ‘inductive dogma’, persuading him of the necessity of clear-cut hypotheses, and that falsification of one’s own theories is not a shame. With his guidance, Eccles set to work to formulate a theoretical version of his electrical hypotheses of synaptic excita- tion24 and inhibition,25 with predictions and possible tests, and then tried to disprove them. The inhibition theory was the first to fall under the fire ‘of his own Popperian architect’,26 in a fateful summer night of 1951. The model was based on the competition between the sensory stimuli (excitatory), and the interfering action of some short-axon interneurones, the ‘Golgi cells’, which, once activated by collaterals of afferent axons, subliminally depolarized the motoneurone, making it inert to the following trains of impulses from the re- ceptors.
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