Fifteenth Ischia Summer School

24 June – 1 July 2017

Cycles of Life

The faculty were Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney), Peder Anker (New York University), Ariane Dröscher (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 de Wiel (University of Cambridge).

Course organizers

Janet Browne (Harvard University), Christiane Groeben (University of Naples), Nick Hopwood (University of Cambridge), Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter) and the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn.

Introduction to 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.

Maria Sibylla Merian — from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Plate LX. (1705)

In the Age of Revolutions this world was reconceived as a historical phenomenon subject to natural law. Enlightenment savants, notably James 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.

Hans Adolf Krebs in front of the eponymous cycle

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.

Structure and resources

Lectures last for up to 30 minutes in one-hour slots, leaving at least 30 minutes for discussion.

Peder Anker's seminar session, during a dance illustrating cycles.

Seminars focus on pre-circulated texts from the readings list. Students were allocated to individual seminar groups (see programme below), to prepare the seminar in consultation with the seminar leader. Often these were an introduction by the seminar leader (5–10 mins), then short informal contributions (2–3 mins) in which the student presenters table questions set by the seminar leaders, followed by discussion in smaller groups and reporting back led by the presenters; but other collective and interactive ways of engaging with the reading materials were seen as well, with students drawing on their own projects to shape the discussion.

The discussion forum is meant for school announcements and to facilitate discussion, including preparing for the seminars before the School takes place. The Forum was and remains publically visible, but only Ischia participants can post and/or start new discussion topics, and only Ischia2017 participants can create topics in 2017-related parts. The students were assigned to seminar groups, with the suggestion of creating discussion topic for their group in order to prepare the seminars. Log on and click ‘Subscribe’ to the 2017 ‘Announcements’ category, to receive emails notifying you of new postings to the forum. All participants were encouraged to present themselves and their work under the ‘2017 Participants’ topic.

There is guidance on how to use the forum and a FAQ page; otherwise contact the web administrator.

Timetable

Readings list

Alphabetized by lecturer, the Readings list for the 2017 Ischia Summer School is publicly available. The files themselves, however, are protected by copyright laws; so the participants were given a login that provided a download box (for a 50MB archive of PDFs) on the Readings list page.

Warwick Anderson

• Elton, C (1931). The study of epidemic diseases among wild animals. Journal of Hygiene, 31(4): 435–456.
• Burnet, FM (1936). Inapparent virus infections: With special reference to Australian examples. British Medical Journal, 1(3915): 99–103. Note: Read this on first, and focus on psittacosis.

Peder Anker

• Randers, J (1971). The Carrying Capacity of our Global Environment — A Look at the Ethical Alternatives. Anticipation 8: 2–11.
• Ballester, A, Botkin, DB, Lovelock, J, Margalef, R, Margulis, L, Oro, J, Schweikert, R, Smith, D, Swain, T, Todd, J, Todd, N and Woodwell, GM (1976). Ecological Considerations for Space Colonies. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 57: 2–4.

Ariane Dröscher

• Figure 1: Pappenheim, A (1905). Bemerkungen über artliche Unterschiede und die gegenseitigen genetischen Beziehungen zwischen den verschiedenen lymphoiden Zellformen des Blutes. Folia haematologica, 9: 321–404.
• Figure 2: What are stem cells? (2017). Caricord homepage. [Retrieved April 15, 2017.]

• Figure 3: Goldthwaite, CA (2009). Cancer: Impact and Challenges. Stem Cell Information website. Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. [Retrieved April 15, 2017.]

• Figure 4: Till, JE, McMulloch, EA and Siminovitch, L (1964). A stochastic model of stem cell proliferation, based on growth of spleen colony-forming cells. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 51(1): 29–36.

• Figure 5: Yamanaka, S (2009). Elite and stochastic models for induced pluripotent stem cell generation. Nature, 460(2 July 2009): 49–52.

• Figure 6: Ladewig, J, Koch, P and Brüstle, O (2013). Leveling Waddington: the emergence of direct programming and the loss of cell fate hierarchies. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 14 (April 2013): 225–236.

Guido Giglioni

• Bacon, F (late 1610s). De vijs mortis. In: Philosophical Studies c.1611–c.1619, ed. by Graham Rees and Michael Edwards (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 337–359.

• Bacon, F (1623). Historia vitae et mortis. In: The ‘Instauratio Magna’ Part III: ‘Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis’, ‘Historia Ventorum’ and ‘Historia Vitae et Mortis’, ed. by Graham Rees with Maria Wakely (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 144–159.

• Bacon, F (1629, posthumously). The World’s a Bubble. In: Works, ed. by James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, Douglas D. Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longman, 1857–1874), Vol. VII, pp. 271–272.

• Bacon, F (1609). Deucalion, or Restoration. In: Works, ed. by James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, Douglas D. Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longman, 1857-1874), Vol. VI, p. 737.

Mathias Grote

• Holmes, F (1995). Life cycles: the regulation of intermediary metabolism. Unpublished manuscript based on a presentation at the meeting of the International Society for Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Biology, Leuven, Belgium. Note: Prepare pp. 1–17, 28–37.

• Krebs, HA (1946). Cyclic processes in living matter. Enzymologia, 12: 88–100. Note: Prepare pp. 95–99, skim the rest.

Shigehisa Kuriyama

• Unschuld, PU and Tessenow, H (2011). Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: An Annotated Translation of Huang Di’s Inner Classic — Basic Questions: 2 volumes, (Berkeley: University of California Press) Chapters 1–2, pp. 29–57.

Maaike van der Lugt

• William of Conches, A Dialogue on Natural Philosophy (Dragmaticon). Translated from the Latin by Italo Ronca and Matthew Curr, Notre Dame, 1997.

• Hildegard of Bingen, Cause et cure. Translated from the Latin by Margret Berger, 1999.

• Aldobrandino of Siena, Regimen of the Body. Translated from the Middle French by Faith Wallis in Medieval Medicine. A Reader.

• A selection of diagrams from medieval manuscripts (pages A–F).

Lynn Nyhart

• Alexander Braun (1853). Introduction. Pp. 1–20 of “On the Phenomenon of Rejuvenescence in Nature” in: Botanical and Physiological Memoirs, edited by Arthur Henfrey. London: Ray Society.
  Translation by Arthur Henfrey of Alexander Braun (1851), Betrachtungen über die Erscheinung der Verjüngung in der Natur. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, pp. 3–23.

Lucy van de Wiel

• van de Wiel, L. (2016). Cellular Origins: A Visual Analysis of Time-Lapse Embryo Imaging. In: Assisted Reproduction in Movement: Normalizations, Disruptions and Transmissions, edited by Merete Lie and Nina Lykke, New York and Oxon: Routledge.

Cost and funding

There was a charge for students of €300 each, covering hotel accommodation and all meals; but students needed to pay for their own travel to Ischia.

The directors have considered and granted one request to waive the fee from a qualified student unable to raise the money themselves, supported by a detailed financial statement and a letter from their institution's head.

The 2017 School was financially supported by the Wellcome Trust, the National Science Foundation (grant ID 1632300) and the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences.

Applications

On March 15, all applicants have been notified of their application outcome. Successful applicants had to confirm their attendance by March 31, and alternative candidates took the places of those unable to attend. By May 26 the registration fees and forms were due.