A Critique of Pure (Genetic) Information

128 Chapter 4
residual embryonic cells. It also failed to account for why such cells, if
present, would begin rapid growth at one time versus another (Rather
1978). A similar yet independent model had been put forward by the
Italian surgeon Durante (1874), who identified “embryonic rests” with
nevi (birthmarks). He envisioned the effects of some kind of irritant
in triggering a renewed proliferative capacity of “elements which have
retained their anatomic embryonic characters in the adult organism”
(Triolo 1965). Beginning in 1894 the histopathologist Hugo Ribbert
hoped to answer criticisms of Cohnheim’s model by presenting a more
circumspect theory in its place. Ribbert suggested that normal growth
was due to the “coordinated and balanced” development of its cellular
components. If this tissue “tension” were lost, and in direct proportion
to the extent to which it was lost, deviation from normal processes would
then ensue (Triolo 1965).
Oncology after the Phylogenetic Turn
The legacy of the nineteenth century for twentieth-century oncology was
a framework for investigating cancer in terms of a dynamic relationship
of monadic cellular parts to the organismic whole of which they are constitutive.
From Virchow through Boll, Durante, Cohnheim, and Ribbert
one can see different attempts at modeling carcinogensis within a common
framework. There is of course no single moment at which point
twentieth-century oncology takes its gene-centered, phylogenetic turn,
and certainly no research finding in oncology that leads it in this direction,
and yet the shift in interpretive orientation is very clear. Perhaps
owing to the lack of a research exemplar that compellingly illustrates
the productivity of the phylogenetic perspective in cancer biology, the
monadic-part-to-whole-composed-of-monads perspective is never fully
lost; rather it is maintained as an ongoing undercurrent which is periodically
rediscovered and rearticulated. What does occur is a bifurcation
such that the perspectives of Müller, Virchow, Cohnheim, et al. lead to
two fundamentally different ways of interpreting the nature of the cell
that becomes aberrant.
Along with other areas of biology (see Allen, Harwood), cancer
research in the twentieth century became oriented toward experiment