The Wollongong UniCentre is hosting the inaugural University City-Campus Gala Dinner on 24 October.
Wollongong Lord Mayor David Campbell will be guest speaker and WIN Television presenter Mary Franks will compere proceedings from 6.30pm in the University Hall.
The black-tie dinner is open to all members of the community.
DIG (Directions in Groove) jazz band will perform.
The Gala Dinner will highlight the links between the University and local business.
Tickets are $40, on sale at the UniCentre general office or by phone on 02 4221 8055.
Tables of ten can be booked.
Robyn Lindley, Ted Steele, Professor Blanden, Ladies, Gentlemen, including ladies and gentlemen of the media , I thank everyone for coming today. I want you to feel at home, so let me start with an intimate confession--Like many others across the University of Wollongong, I have in my files a fat folder labelled "E.J Steele".
But, my file contains historical research material for a scientific biography that may one day be written on the former wild colonial boy of molecular genetics. As an historian of science I have followed Steele’s career for at least sixteen years, ever since I first heard him interviewed by Robin Williams on ABC Radio National’s Science Show in the early 1980s, well before his appointment at Wollongong, and well before the Science Show apparently stopped being interested in critical history and philosophy of science. I suspect this will be the first of several celebrations regarding Steele which we’ll have over the next few years.
We have before us an important book, and potentially an extraordinarily important one. I'd like to introduce it to you from my perspective as an historian of science, interested in the dynamics of scientific change. It's an uncompromising book--no concessions to popularisation or the 10 second grab--one learns the relevant science and is led through a considerable part of its conceptual and experimental history. The book is cleverly structured. We enter not so much an hermeneutic circle as a helix of understanding, circling back and around issues with more deeply sedimented understanding each time.
What this book does and does not do is vitally important. It is certainly a marker in the history of Steele's struggle to get first order claims just about immune system accepted; but it also looks forward--to future trajectories consequent upon Steele's claims over wider swathes of biological sciences.
Some people will over dramatise the book--it does coyly invite us to do that--all cleverly staged claims work like that. Bruce Juddery writing in the Canberra times, has taken the bait and sees an overthrow of neo-Darwinism. -Yet, strictly speaking the book does not purport to refute Darwinism at all; rather, it bids to add a potentially hugely significant modification to it. The central claim is that transfer of genetic informatin can occur from somatic cells to germline cells--using mechanisms of RNA reverse transcription, but only for certain alterations of genes in somatic cells in the immune system of vertebrates--in limited scope this is the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and even in limited form it does refute something-- Weismann's doctrine of the hermetic separation of germ line cells and somatic cells.
In the 1880s August Weismann spent more time than he should have cutting the tails off generations of laboratory rats. He observed, correctly, that the rats never passed on the shortened tail to each other through reproduction. He, concluded, grandly as one does from supposedly conclusive experiments, that Lamarkian inheritance of acquired characteristics is not a fact of nature. Weismann worked before the establishment of classical genetics and he wasn't motivated by it. He was more Darwinian than Darwin, wanted to excise inheritance of acquired characteristics, His resulting claim about the barrier mapped onto later classical genetics, made sense and became one of its fundamental principles. The Weismann barrier is a big fact, deeply embedded in biology, and termed a dogma by Steele et al.
Now facts are rather complicated things--more complicated in modern science than ever they are in common sense and everyday life. In one of Dorothy L Sayer's stories, Lord Peter Whimsy is told "My Lord, facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough, they generally run away" . Facts in modern science depend upon elaborate tissues of theory, theory-loaded experimental hardware, and elaborately shaped and selected data. Facts need to be argued for, framed in text and rhetoric, communicated and sold, for colleagues and peers to accept and perhaps put to work. Facts can evolve, they can be renegotiated, they can change relevance, significance, they can also cease to exist. Our facts--scientific facts--have histories, they are not little mirrors held up to nature--but complex tissues of assumption, framing, theoretical loading, instrumental shaping--and round after round of expert deployment, redeployment, reinterpretation, modification etc.
Before Steele and co, others have stood on theoretical ground from which Weismann's fact looked shaky. Paul Kammerer and his brilliant biographer Arthur Koestler stood there, and so have 20th century advocates of cellular inheritance documented by Jan Sapp's historical researches. But nobody, prior to Steele and co has done to Weismann what displacement of facts requires--the alternative claim has to take some hold in the expert community--new problems have to be envisioned and solved, new predictions made and adequately confirmed; plausible links made to other accepted bodies of fact and theory. The counter claim, the counter fact needs more than to be asserted, it has to be breathed into scientific practice, to some degree at least.
Hopeful candidates to become new facts, new discoveries, begin their lives as weak and vulnerable claims, mere claims, hedged about with lots of argument, footnotes, massaged data, skilled rhetoric of presentation. It's largely up to the wider expert community either to ignore or reject such a claim; or to assimilate, alter, or re-deploy it in various ways.. Most claims die, never taken up, even to be refuted. Some live on in footnotes or as minor agreed pieces in some later arguments. But as a claim begins to take hold as fact -- it necessarily begins to evolve-- it is re-used, embedded in other arguments for other claims, perhaps embedded in instruments and techniques and in textbooks. Things happen--grants come from even conservative peer review processes, such as the ARC; postgraduates seek out the newly emergent master--these are the recruits for the second generation articulation of the fact.
Steele’s early attempts to establish the inheritance of acquired characteristics at the molecular level in the immune system were controversial and met with legitimate as well as somewhat political and personal resistance. His early bids were not taken up. Steele's early claims were based on quite different modes of experiment, instrumentation and data than at present. In recent years the assemblage of new teams, and the adoption of new techniques of investigation, have led first to a slow, and now to a quickening flow of evidence in favour of Steele’s claims.
The last few years have seen the claim began to bite. One sees this in the pattern of his invitations to speak and publish, as well as in his team’s core research publications, a shift in response with more instances of acknowledgment’ of the ‘fact-like’ status of his claim.
We are faced with one of those situations, fairly common, I think, where the actual passage to the first threshold of facthood sort of sneaks up on the players--proponents and opponents alike--is largely unnoticed and unremarked upon. It is only just a little bit afterward that one recognises that a new significant fact has been born.
I think we are there on the core fact, and this book is a marker for that with its shrewd combination of textbook and serious lay account. The issue now is not so much whether Steele and Blandon have a major discovery about vertebrate immune systems, the issue is where this claim goes now--to other phyla, to other bodily systems and even to cultural practices of humankind? If the latter then, we have 'the big one' on our hands, a biological sciences wide shift, a major revolution--we don't know yet.
But if no revolution eventuates, it will not be for the lack of Ted trying. Scientists can play different tactics with essentially the same claim--they can package and communicate a claim as a mere modification of an existing context, or as a far reaching challenge to orthodoxy. Steele has always played hard ball with his claims--no mere modificationism; he wants to push out the envelop of significance of his claims, not soften them and meld them into some routine background of slowly evolving normal research. I'm reminded of Lavoisier--a revolutionary strategist from the beginning, but no wild colonial boy to the scientific establishment of his day, rather a powerful figure in Paris. Early oxygen could have been sold as neat modification of the existing phlogiston theory--Lavoisier went for broke and purported that a complete and total revolution was in progress. So has Steele--hence his early travails, and his presently rising stocks.
Nobody succeeds in really major scientific innovation without that kind of strategy, by being faint hearted, suffering fools gladly or being particularly kind to perceived enemies. Ted Steele is pugnacious and determined, committed, serious and unrelenting. [He is also loyal and dedicated to his friends, colleagues, discipline and the spirit of his institutions. Those are rare virtues indeed, especially in this Dawkins/Kemp nightmare twilight of the academy.]
Still, to play hardball with novel claims makes one unpopular, it invites attacks of all kinds: those just this side of legitimacy--people reasonably defending their symbolic investments in their skills, concepts and standing; and those just the other side of legitimacy--people censoring, delaying, misrepresenting, white anting in institutional, publication and grant giving contexts. All that has to happen because scientific communities are communities of humans--there is always a distribution of radical and conservative spins on agendas; a distribution of integrity and trustworthiness; a distribution of drive and sloth; of, yes, non-routine inventiveness and incremental i doting and t crossing.
Well all this relates to the micro politics of fact making within an expert field or tradition. The book is filled with echoes of that, exciting to the historian; but there is more to take into account, something wider, more broadly contextual and bearing on the macro history of biological knowledge. Let me explain.
Put simply, there has been an interplay of social thought and modern biological thought since the 18th century--a mutual inscribing of social theory and biological theory upon each other since the time of Lamarck and Malthus, right through Darwin, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Socio-Biology and now Steeleian neo-Lamarckism. Debates about Steelism are tacitly, if not openly articulated upon wider features of the present social and political context.
Let's explore this with a some from the social history of biology. Steele invokes Jean-Babtiste Lamarck 1744-1829. Some heavy ironies are involved--as well as a profound cultural and political genealogical link. Lamarck thought that species do not exist--they are unreal, artificial divisions in a seamless chain, the dynamic chain of being. All things dynamically transform--they don’t evolve,they transform, because extinctions do not occur
In ideal terms the history of life consists in linear series of gradual transformations of forms splayed out in time. Spontaneous generation from inorganic matter constantly feeds organisms onto the lowest level, and the process of transformation leads their descendants up the scale. In Lamarck this is always occurring, new entrants are even now starting at bottom---those presently existing up the scale having been travelling, transforming for long time. Hence for Lamarck--there is no unique one off fossil record. - Fossil forms could easily have undiscovered living representatives.
Now, inheritance of acquired characteristics is not the prime motor, but a secondary process. It is used to account for fact that organisms do not conform to the simple linear scale. Contingencies of environment shape divergent transformation due to inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Why then is Lamarck identified so closely with inheritance of acquired characteristics, this secondary cause in his theory? Here comes the mutual inscribing of biology and social ideology. Lamarck was a child of the French Revolution: There was a social payoff if inheritance of acquired characteristics is true--environmental manipulation could redress differences and deficiencies of habit infused by civilisation--humans could progress in even better beings. But, with the fall of Napoleon and restoration of the bourbon monarchy in 1815, Lamarck became politically passe, and, according to the new monarchist doyen of French biology, the brilliant geological catastrophist and palaeontologist, Cuvier, Lamarck became scientifically bankrupt as well.
As I said, Lamarck had no need for a one off fossil record in the Earth’s crust; for genuine species or for genuine extinctions. On these conditions, no Darwinian theory would have been possible. It was Cuvier, Lamarck's great conservative, creationist rival, who re-created and enriched these concepts--creating the discursive space in which Darwinian theory could be constructed.
Now Darwin himself was no Darwinian-- he had the inheritance of acquired characteristics as an important secondary evolutionary process. It was later read out of the paradigm --but why and how?.
Now for the deep Lamarck/Steele link: I spoke just before of Weismann working prior to the development of genetics to purify Darwinism of Darwin's own commitment to inheritance of acquired characteristics. Why the rush, and what powered the easy acceptance of Weismann experiments, which now look to some so silly, tendentious, and irrelevant.
According to the best Darwin scholars-- the debate over evolution was part of a larger debate on humankind's place in nature. It took place in an atmosphere of controversy over Malthus' pessimism about population growth outstripping food resources. As Marx claimed, and the great historian of science Bob Young established, Darwin read into nature Malthus' conservative views on human population and potential social conflict. The social was inscribed onto the biological.
With Darwinian scientific theory in hand as its fig leaf, Social Darwinism became the dominant ideology in the gilded age of the late 19th century amongst captains of industry and political elites of rising empires-- British, German and American. The biological was reinscribed onto the social.
As Bob Young, Barry Barnes, Stephen Shapin and our former Wollongong colleague Evelleen Richards have shown, Charles Darwin himself espoused Social Darwinist ideas and that no line of epistemological purity can be drawn around Darwinian science to separate it from the social theory or social ideology.
Under the reign of social Darwinism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was a tad too leftist, too social reformist. Wiessman's claim could ride that cultural wave, even before classical genetics existed. And so here's my macro historical speculation about Steele. As Lamarck did before him, Steele is marching into the face of the same sort of ideological conjuncture. I suspect that some of the resistance to Steele's neo-Lamarckianism comes from the same sort of laissez faire, dog eat dog, social Darwinist, reactionary social thought as it did in the later 19th century when Darwin's own theory was cleansed of Lamarckian left leaning social reformism. Conversely, who is to say that Steele might not benefit from what looks at least like a glimmer of a return to more interventionist and state-centred social reformist policies. Perhaps in 50 years historians of science will speak of John Ralston Saul having played Malthus to Steele's Darwin.
With that happier prospect in mind, finally, I'd like to propose two toasts rolled into one--
(1) to the now visible Steelean ‘mini revolution’ or ‘largish discovery’, and (2) to the authors of an enterprising and remarkable book--a didactic masterpiece and historical marker--just what a potential revolution needs if it is going to have a chance to happen!