What history tells us III. Andre Lwoff: From protozoology to molecular definition of viruses

摘要

The ideas of the historian Thomas S Kuhn on the development of science have pervaded contemporary scientific thought. It is widely admitted that there is, in the history of scientific disciplines, an alternance of normal science -with a dominant paradigm - and revolutionary episodes, corresponding to the replacement of an 'old' paradigm by a new one. The rise of molecular biology is frequently identified with a Kuhnian revolution. However, many doubts have been voiced concerning the value of the Kuhnian model, in particular the possibility of applying it beyond the discipline in which it was elaborated - i.e. physics (Wilkins 1996). Did the molecular paradigm replace a previous paradigm, or simply fill a 'hole' in the preexisting explanations? Is the new vision incommensurable with the previous one, as successive paradigms are supposed to be?