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Observing temporal order in living processes: on the role of time in embryology on the cell level in the 1870s and post-2000

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Abstract

The article analyses the role of time in the visual culture of two phases in embryological research: at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the years around 2000. The first case study involves microscopical cytology, the second reproductive genetics. In the 1870s we observe the first of a series of abstractions in research methodology on conception and development, moving from a method propagated as the observation of the “real” living object to the production of stained and fixated objects that are then aligned in temporal order. This process of abstraction ultimately fosters a dissociation between space and time in the research phenomenon, which after 2000 is problematized and explicitly tackled in embryology. Mass data computing made it possible partially to re-include temporal complexity in reproductive genetics in certain, though not all, fields of reproductive genetics. Here research question, instrument and modelling interact in ways that produce very different temporal relationships. Specifically, this article suggests that the different techniques in the late nineteenth century and around 2000 were employed in order to align the time of the researcher with that of the phenomenon and to economize the researcher’s work in interaction with the research material’s own temporal challenges.

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Notes

  1. The field of reproductive genetics, used here as case study for the time around and after 2000, left its first major traces in the literature after the mid-1990s.

  2. Schmidgen uses the term “industrialization of the cell” for the period between the 1870s and the 1890s (Schmidgen 2007, p. 57; Giedion 1987).

  3. See also Schickore (2007), Clarke and Jacyna (1987), Schleiden (1842/1843, 120ff.), Gooday (1991) and Wahrig-Schmidt (1994). On the debates over the correct use of the microscope regarding conception, (see, e.g., Bischoff 1854).

  4. Historians of science tend to attribute the observation of the intrusion of the sperm to Fol’s publication 2 years later (Fol 1877; see e.g., Cremer and Cremer 2009), although contemporary reviews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century laud Hertwig’s convincing reports on conception.

  5. As Hertwig specifically mentions Auerbach as the person who inspired him to work at the coast, this cannot yet have been a common approach by embryologists.

  6. The five-minute time interval as a standard was already broadly established in this field of cell studies (and in, for example, the physiology of neurology; see Bock von Wülfingen 2013).

  7. In the late 1870s and 1880s, arguments about processes in the cell became more strongly oriented on chemistry. The substance in the nucleus, previously studied and discussed in terms of its potential function in the context of heredity, was more and more often discussed in terms of its potential atomic constitution and molecular size (Nägeli and Weismann did this at length in order to calculate how many “gemmules” could fit into a nucleus). This “chemicalization” of the “hereditary substance” is linked to a chemicalization of microscopic work after the 1870s (Miescher 1874; Flemming 1882, pp. 99–129; Dahm 2005).

  8. The field is named and framed by specific national funding calls, university chairs and international professional associations.

  9. This method means to mark many minute DNA probes simultaneously with fluorescent substances, which are ‘read out’ by a computer program.

  10. The following analysis has been presented in a discussion of systems approaches in Bock von Wülfingen (2009).

  11. These are mice which have manipulated genetic material (e.g. by exposure to radioactivity), done in such a way that with a higher mutation rate, some “genes” do not function and are thus “knocked out.”

  12. See the similar case of freezing cellular organisms at different evolutionary stages (Griesemer and Yamashita 2005), while the case of Marey’s photographs is closer to Helmholtz’s intention to access unperceivably short intervals of time (Didi-Huberman 1990).

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  1. Institute for Cultural History and Theory, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10199, Berlin, Germany

    Bettina Bock von Wülfingen

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Bock von Wülfingen, B. Observing temporal order in living processes: on the role of time in embryology on the cell level in the 1870s and post-2000. HPLS 37, 87–104 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-014-0054-6

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