Applications are invited for this week-long summer school, which
provides advanced training in history of the life sciences through
lectures, seminars and discussions in a historically rich and naturally
beautiful setting. The theme for 2017 is ‘Cycles of Life’. The confirmed
faculty are Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney), Peder Anker (New
York University), Ariane Droescher (University of Bologna), Guido
Giglioni (Warburg Institute, London), Mathias Grote
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Shigehisa Kuriyama (Harvard
University), Maaike van der Lugt (Université Paris Diderot), Lynn Nyhart
(University of Wisconsin-Madison), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPIWG,
Berlin) and Lucy van der Wiel (University of Cambridge).
The theme
In the early twenty-first century, organisms are understood as having
life cycles, inherited sequences of stages through which they reproduce
and adapt to environmental challenges. Strategies to disrupt pest and
pathogen life cycles play key roles in agriculture, biomedicine and
public health. Organisms are also connected to each other, as well as to
the air, soil, rocks and water, by material fluxes forming
‘biogeochemical’ cycles. The continual recycling of such elements and
compounds as carbon, nitrogen and water links the life and environmental
sciences from biochemistry to geology and ecology. The effects of human
activities on these nutrient cycles threaten us with climate change,
resource depletion and pollution, some of the biggest challenges in
global politics today. Yet if cycles are topical, they are neither all
new, nor all the same. Cycles of various kinds are among the oldest ways
of framing human existence on earth and in the cosmos, and of thinking
about health and disease, animals and plants – and at least calendars
and seasons remain fundamental. This summer school seeks to understand
the history of ‘cycles of life’ from early times to the present day, to
trace connections and to identify patterns of continuity and change.
Cycles of generation and corruption, and of the transformation of the
elements, have long structured knowledge and everyday life. The
revolutions of the celestial bodies were thought to shape repeated
events in the sublunary sphere, from the succession of the seasons to
women’s monthly bleeding. Linking microcosm and macrocosm, William
Harvey likened the circulation of the blood to the weather cycle. Human
beings, their bodily constitutions and fever cycles determined by natal
astrology, proceeded through the seven ages of man (or woman) in the
hope that individual death would be followed by not just a new
generation, but also spiritual rebirth. Religious festivals, calendars
and almanacs followed an annual cycle, although Judaeo-Christian
theology was based on a finite, arrow-like chronology that would provide
an important resource for a transformation in conceptions of time
around 1800.
In the Age of Revolutions this world was reconceived as a historical
phenomenon subject to natural law. Enlightenment savants, notably
William Hutton and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, proposed that nature ran in
perpetual cycles. Hutton’s earth was a machine like a steam-engine for
producing worlds without beginning or end; in Lamarck’s transformism
spontaneous generation initiated series upon series of ascending forms.
By the nineteenth century theories of evolution were founded on the
reality of irreversible change, not least through extinction. Individual
organisms were understood to develop through life cycles that
occasionally showed ‘alternation of generations’, the phenomenon of a
species appearing in two different forms, such that an individual would
resemble its grandmother and granddaughters, but not mother or
daughters. Rich studies of life cycles led to new understanding of the
reproduction of plants and animals, with perturbations providing
variations from which nature would select.
The ground was laid for a more general view of cycles of life and
nutrition during the debates that in the mid-1800s pitted Louis Pasteur
against Justus Liebig and defined the roles of biology and chemistry in
explaining the phenomena of generation, contagion and putrefaction.
Biologically, life, even microscopic life, came to be understood as
arising not spontaneously, but strictly from reproduction of the same
species. Chemically, the cycles were more promiscuous: in accordance
with the principle of the conservation of matter, microbes made new life
possible by rotting dead bodies, returning their molecules to the earth
and making them available for another organism. Pasteur taught that
life stems from death and death from life in an eternal cycle. Chemical
changes in individual bodies — Liebig’s ‘metamorphoses’, or ‘metabolism’
as it came to be known — were thus linked to life cycles and the larger
circulation of elements. Fundamental cycles of photosynthesis, nitrogen
fixation and carbon assimilation were identified in plants.
Biological cycles gained currency in the mid-twentieth century, from
the citric acid (Krebs) to the menstrual cycle, from nutrient to cell
cycles. On a larger scale, by deploying radioactive isotopes as tracers
after World War II, ecologists such as Evelyn Hutchinson followed carbon
and phosphorus through biogeochemical cycles that included living and
non-living compartments of ‘ecosystems’. Cyberneticians touted ‘circular
systems’ as a general key to ‘self-regulating processes,
self-orientating systems and organisms, and self-directing
personalities’; and feedback became a standard concept. Control
techniques were invented to intervene in biological cycles and create
artificial ones, from the oral contraceptive pill and IVF treatment to
the thermal cycling that drives the polymerase chain reaction.
Historians have investigated only a few biological cycles and largely
in isolation; this school aims to encourage synthesis. We shall explore
shared properties of cycles, and the differences and relations between
one discipline or research programme and another and over the centuries.
Modern metabolic and diurnal cycles oscillate. Life cycles are
directional and their individual spans finite. Heredity and evolution
work through their succession and endless variation. Ecological cycles
are open-ended – and yet the ideal of a return to an original state
underpins all modern conservation and restoration work. Concepts of
cyclicity in the life sciences thus operate on vastly different spatial
and temporal scales, and at the same time constitute a productive point
of intersection with physics, chemistry, geology and economics. How much
the various modern and premodern cycles have in common, or what
biological cycles share with those in other sciences, and other domains
of knowledge and practice, are open questions. The theme ‘cycles of
life’ invites fresh engagement with the history of the life sciences
over the long term.