Köhler and Milstein’s Monoclonal Antibody Monstrosity (1975)
When I began my journey into the world of “antibodies,” I was rather shocked by the complete lack of direct scientific evidence that these entities actually existed and functioned as described.
Like most, I assumed that what we were told about “antibodies” and the “immune” system was built upon solid scientific evidence. However, what I found was the exact opposite.
Like the equally fictional “viruses,” the effects observed from unnatural processes created in a lab were construed as evidence for the existence of unseen entities that were somehow involved as the cause.
In the case of the “antibody,” this began with the mixture and manipulation of blood from different species where the effects created were used as indirect evidence of existence.
There was no purification (free on contaminants, host materials, pollutants, etc.) and isolation (separation from everything else) of these so-called “antibodies” at any point in time in order to study and experiment with.
These lab-created effects were used by researchers to dream up the concept of an imaginary causal entity regarding how it looked, formed, and functioned. This whole process was instigated by the work of Robert Koch disciples Emil Von Behring and Paul Ehrlich.
While Von Behring presented the lab-created effect, it was Ehrlich who presented the presumed cause when he laid out his side-chain theory of “antibody” production and his conceptual drawings of what French biologist Felix Le Dantec termed the “imaginary invalid” in the early 1900s.
As noted by American Pathologist Harry Gideon Wells on page 109 in his 1929 book The Chemical Aspects of Immunity, “antibodies” were only “known” due to altered reactivity of sera in a lab. They had no idea what “antibodies” were or if they even existed as material objects.
“We attribute this altered reactivity [of sera] to the presence of “antibodies,” despite the fact that we have absolutely no knowledge of what these antibodies may be, or even that they exist as material objects. Like the enzymes, we recognize them by what they do without discovering just what they are.”
The fact that effects were being applied to unknown entities was also noted in a 1910 German textbook Die Methoden der Immunodiagnostik und Immunotherapie which admitted that all attempts to isolate “antibodies” had failed. Only effects were known, and these effects were attributed to the unseen entities.
“In order to learn the nature of these antibodies attempts have been made to isolate them chemically. Thus far all such trials have been unsuccessful.
It is even uncertain whether these so-called antibodies are definite chemical entities. Only the effects of the serum as a whole are known, and the ingredients in it to which these activities are attributed are thought of as antibodies.”
What proceeded were conceptual drawings by Ehrlich and others of entities that belonged to the imagination. Like “viruses,” the “antibodies” existed as part of what was known as the “domain of the invisible specimen behavior.”
As noted by Henry Smith Williams and James Beveridge in the 1915 book The Mechanism of Immunization, “it would be absurd to imagine that the mechanical diagrams have any representation in the world of fact.
They are figments of the imagination and may serve some useful purpose as picture books serve in teaching a child the alphabet.”
According to the 1993 paper Ehrlich’s “Beautiful Pictures” and the Controversial Beginnings of Immunological Imagery, the drawings were not seen as a “faithful image of reality,” and many felt that they “should be discarded because they were fundamentally misleading.”
The paper went on to state that the material nature of the “antibody” was based upon faith, and that the status of the existence of these entities would remain uncertain until they were able to be properly purified.
“So, despite various professions of faith in the material nature of “antibodies,” their ontological status remained uncertain, a situation ascribed by some scientists to the failure to purify chemically the elusive entities and thus to ascertain whether they were indeed material substances.
This, of course, begged the question, because in order to base an argument on the possible chemical purification of antibodies one had first to assume that antibodies were indeed discrete chemical substances, which is precisely what Ehrlich’s opponents contested.”
The authors noted that, to even ascertain whether “antibodies” were material substances, one had to beg the question and assume the existence of the “antibodies” as discrete chemical substances to begin with.
This a form of logically fallacious thinking where the “argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. In other words, you assume without proof the stand/position, or a significant part of the stand, that is in question.
Begging the question is also called arguing in a circle.” This pattern of logically fallacious thinking is often encountered in virology, and it is clearly no stranger to “antibody” research as well. Due to this inability to properly purify and isolate “antibodies,” the authors stated that this debate over the existence, nature, and-properties of “antibodies” lasted for decades.
There were many competing theories and ideas tossed around as the researchers did not have the ability to find “antibodies” within the supposed natural environment in the serum of a host in order to study and manipulate during experimentation.
The entire field of “antibody” research was vastly restricted by not being able to directly study the thing that they claimed to be studying. However, rather than attempting to resolve the issue by finding a way to obtain “antibodies” from the host in a purified and isolated state.
The solution was to turn to the use of the cell culture techniques popularized by virologists in order to artificially create these unseen entities with the development of something that became known as the hybridoma technology.
Presented below is how the pseudoscientific cell culture technology was called upon once again in 1975 in order to create the evidence for the existence of a conceptual entity never observed within its natural host environment.
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