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PARTISAN REVIEW
"stimulate the phagocyte" was based on the work of Nobelist (1908) lIya
Metchnikoff, the reductionist microbe hunter who fell out of favor in
Odessa for reasons not limited to Czarist Russia: he was a Jew, an athe–
ist, and a proponent of Western science. Sheltered by the lnstitut Pasteur,
he founded and named the science of gerontology; his theory of aging was
celebrated by Aldous Huxley in
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
At
the Pasteur, where his ashes still rest in the library, Metchnikoff described
how anthrax bacilli interact with phagocytes (chiefly white blood cells).
The anthrax bacilli are gobbled up by our phagocytes, which are indeed
stimulated. The white cells go on the attack to kill the bacteria, unless, of
course, the microbes win the battle. The outcome of this contest is con–
trolled by the flow of phosphorous. John Collier of Harvard has worked
out the complex brew that makes anthrax toxic. Each quantum of toxin
contains seven molecules of a packaging protein that permits the toxin to
hijack the cell's own machinery, three molecules of a factor that produces
swelling, and three of the deadly "lethal factor." Happily, the X-ray struc–
tures of these proteins and their targets in the cell are now known:
it
turns
out that anthrax lethal factor cuts to pieces an important, phosphorous–
dependent signaling molecule in our white cells (MEKK). Since we've
traced the white cell's defense mechanism to its component molecules,
we've learned that three drugs already in the clinic-now used for hyper–
tension, arthritis, and other infections-will protect phagocytes and ani–
mals from anthrax bacilli. One hopes that manmade outbreaks will not
force human trials, but anthrax has already taught us that reductionism
redux may solve
The Doctor's Dilemma.
Reductionism is the sine qua non of modern evolutionary science. It
is no accident that its antonym, "holism," was coined out of whole
cloth in an anti-Darwinian tract called
Holism and Evolution
written in
1926 by the Boer general Jan Christian Smuts, a defender of Owen
Chadwick's brand of theology. Reductionism can be traced to Hippolyte
Adolphe Taine, historian and literary critic who introduced the term
reductionism in his 1872 book
de l'Intelligence:
"Since our ideas may be
reduced to images, their laws may be reduced to laws of images. Images,
then, are what we must study." Taine, whose literary sensibility was
vast, would have been in tune with Williams's reductionist plea "No
ideas but in things." Taine's laws of images have led to the molecular
biologist's FISH and microchips, and the optical, digital, kinetic tech–
niques we use to ferret out the facts of science.
Finally, it is probably no accident either that the words reductionism
(Taine) and impressionism (Louis Leroy) arose in the same year. Taine's
shimmering prose in the following passage is the mirror image of
