The Antibody

Written by Mike Stone on September 30, 2024. Posted in Current News

When I originally went scouring through the history of “antibody” research back in April 2021, I was primarily searching for two key pieces of evidence: first, I wanted to see if researchers had ever actually demonstrated that they had purified and isolated the so-called “antibodies” directly from the serum of a host and fully characterized these entities.

Second, I wanted to see if they had ever taken these purified and isolated entities and demonstrated experimentally that, by exposing them to a sample containing a purified and isolated pathogenic “virus,” this actually resulted in the assumed effects of the “antibodies” attaching to, and ultimately eliminating, the “virus.”

Since I knew through my prior research that finding purified and isolated “viruses” was an impossibility, I anticipated that finding the evidence I sought for the much smaller “antibodies” would be a rather tall order. Regardless, if researchers were able to achieve purification and isolation of the “antibodies,”

I wanted to see clear electron microscope images of these Y-shaped particles looking exactly as they are depicted through computer-generated artist renderings in the textbooks, the mainstream media, and the scientific literature.

I sought direct clear visual evidence that these uniquely shaped substances existed within the fluids as described, and not only as cartoons and models.

As noted by the 1993 paper Ehrlich’s “Beautiful Pictures” and the Controversial Beginnings of Immunological Imagery.

It is a belief that “antibodies” are biochemical entities in the blood, and the idea of these entities as Y-shaped molecules is due to the popularization of the images found in textbook, scientific articles, advertisements, and even as logos in biotech companies.

“The term antibody today refers to discrete biochemical entities present in the blood.

The belief that antibodies are such entities is held not only by scientists and physicians, but also by the lay public, who learns about “antibodies,” if not in school, then at least in the course of routine medical practices such as vaccination and, increasingly, through the so-called popularization of science.

In addition, some people will readily associate the term antibody with the characteristic Y-shaped structure found not only in textbooks and specialized scientific articles but also, more recently, in advertisements and even as the logos of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.”

The authors of the paper ultimately concluded that, from the time of Paul Ehrlich and his original drawings of the invisible “antibody” entity, there was a conceptual move away from directly observable phenomena to the inference of invisible entities or processes (such as “immune” responses), based upon macroscopic experimental reactions that were created in the lab.

“Beyond this point, what seems to us to be the central issue in Ehrlich’s endeavor is the establishment of a domain of invisible specimen behavior and the correlative conflation of observable macroscopic experimental reactions (agglutinations, precipitations, and so forth) with invisible combinations of newly constituted entities.

As a result of this conflation, the performance of immunological experiments and the constitution of new immunological entities became the two sides of a single representational coin.”

Upon doing so, a representational short-cut was created where these observable reactions were conflated with presumed, but yet entirely unseen, biological entities and mechanisms.

These abstract entities were then regarded to be as “real” as the observable outcomes, despite the lack of any direct evidence to their existence.

This conflation obscured the distinction between what is directly measurable and what is inferred by the researchers, raising questions about the validity of the conclusions drawn from such experiments.

It created the opportunity for researchers to lose sight of the fact that these drawings are hypothetical representations of unseen entities and processes that have not been proven to be a direct reflection of reality.

The “antibody” is a conceptual model that originated with Ehrlich and evolved over time into its current Y-shaped imagery in order to be used to explain certain chemical reactions that were observed in immunological experiments, such as agglutination (clumping of particles together) or precipitation (soluble reactants that come together to make one insoluble product, the precipitate).

However, despite what the scientific literature states, models might not accurately represent what is actually happening in reality, especially when dealing with what was coined the “domain of invisible specimen behavior.”

Problems arise when researchers treat these abstract representations as if they are direct reflections of reality when they are, in fact, simply constructed explanations using models based upon observed reactions.

Conflating what can be empirically observed with that which is entirely theorized leads researchers to make assumptions about invisible processes that are not fully substantiated by the data from their experiments. They end up fitting their experimental results to the model in order to make things “work.”

Echoing virology, I knew that for most of the time immunologists claimed to be working with these entities, no direct visual depictions actually existed.

The “antibody,” like the “virus,” began simply as a conceptual idea to explain lab-created effects. Starting with this understanding, I wanted to pinpoint exactly when these entities were first claimed to be observed in reality.

After searching through the main research papers from 1890 to the 1970s, I could find no direct evidence that “antibodies” were the Y-shaped proteins they had been depicted as over the years. I wanted to know if there were any actual images of these particles and what methods were used to generate these depictions.

Were the images of purified, isolated particles taken directly from the serum? Were they unadulterated, or were they computer-generated reconstructions fitted to a framework or model?”

Presented here is what I was able to uncover at that time, along with additional commentary and research done recently, looking into the origins of the depictions of the Y-shaped “antibody.”

See more here Substack

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