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Developing Science at the Risk of Oblivion: The Case of Filippo Bottazzi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 May 2011
Abstract
Filippo Bottazzi (1867–1941), university professor of physiology, director of the Neapolitan Zoological Station ‘A. Dohrn’ and commonly credited as ‘the father of Italian biochemistry’, is an interesting case study of a distinctive intellectual risk: oblivion following upon the honours of a successful career. Bottazzi's fundamental work in physiology was distinguished by its close relationship with biological and physical chemistry. The international level of Bottazzi in this disciplinary field was commonly acknowledged, although he was also deeply interested in philosophy and history of life sciences. At the beginning of the twentieth century, together with many other prominent Italian intellectuals, Bottazzi mounted a long-lasting resistance against the prevailing idealistic trends in philosophy. The paper illustrates Bottazzi's contributions to some crucial and, at the time, completely unsettled epistemological questions on biomedical science, such as mechanism versus vitalism and the relation between biological and physical explanation. Within this framework, Bottazzi's historical studies are also considered. Finally, the paper argues for political and ideological reasons behind the silence surrounding Bottazzi after his death, pointing to his scientific commitment to the nutritional politics of the Italian Fascist regime, with its racial implications.
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- Focus: Risks of the Intellectual Life Guest Editor: Cinzia Ferrini
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- Copyright © Academia Europaea 2011
References
Notes
1. For detailed information on Bottazzi's life and works, see the URL: http://www.disonline.it/Filippo%20Bottazzi.htm. This website includes also many photographs and documents.Google Scholar
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34. Lina Ferrini's Economia in cucina senza sacrificio a tavola (Economy in the Kitchen without Sacrifice at the Table), published in 1939, provided menus for a family of five while keeping to a budget of 20 lire per day. Eggs and organ meat were recommended to stretch the meat budget and guarantee sufficient proteins for the diet.Google Scholar
36. Chemical aspects of nutrition; the dairy proteinic ration; the alimentary value of grain and other cereals; the vitaminic properties of tomatoes, citrus fruits and other fruits, as bananas; the role of minerals in the alimentation; milk and its derivates in the alimentation of infants and adults.Google Scholar
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38. In the course of a lengthy interview with Italy's head of state in 1932, Emil Ludwig, a well-known German biographer born in a Jewish family, asked Mussolini point blank if there was anything to the rumour that Jews were precluded from membership in the Academy of Italy. To which the dictator replied, ‘Absurd..’. At the time, Mussolini defined the race as a merely ‘spiritual’, or ‘sentimental’ concept. But in the 1938 he ordered to the Accademia d'Italia to cancel all the publications written by scientists of Jewish origin from the institution's general archive – and obviously to purge their authors.Google Scholar
39. One of the evicted Jewish physiologists, the Turin professor Carlo Foà, ‘underlined further the importance of negative eugenics for a country like Italy, whose major wealth was its human capital, and praised the government efforts to improve the quality of the “race” through prenatal and neonatal care, assistance to unwed mothers and illegitimate children, through sports and cultural events, while imposing a “bachelor tax” on unmarried men and provided tax and other benefits for large families.’ See Foà, C. (1927) Critica all’Eugenica Negativa (Milano: Minerva) . The quotation comes from an article of his son, the physiologist Pietro P. Foà (see the URL http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~richardk/piero/eugenics.htmlreferences).Google Scholar
40. Positive eugenics was based on poor science and very limited knowledge of the laws of human heredity. In fact, the elimination of many undesirable traits would have required the sterilization of all healthy carriers of heterozygotic genes.Google Scholar
41. Gemelli was Rector of the Catholic University of Milan and as such conferred to him the Laurea Honoris Causa in Philosophy (1932). Four years later, Gemelli introduced Bottazzi in the Pontifica Accademica delle Scienze (1936). In turn, Bottazzi had sponsored Gemelli's membership in the Accademia d'Italia with a letter forwarded to Mussolini through the hierarch Farinacci, Secretary General of the Fascist Party. In his accompanying letter, dated 20 March 1935, Farinacci wrote: ‘You have to assert your authority on Federzoni [at the time the Accademia's President] who, being more pro-Jewish than fascist, has not so much liking for Gemelli’. See Petacco, A. (1997) L'archivio segreto di Mussolini (Milano: Mondadori), pp. 82–83. Anyway, Federzoni fired Gemelli's candidature.Google Scholar
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51. In his later years Bottazzi taught the history of science at Cambridge University.Google Scholar
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56. Wilhelm Wundt, André Lalande, Johann Bernhard Stallo, Robert Mayer, Gustav Robert Kirchhof, Claude Bernard, Ernst Mach, John Henry Poynting, Wilhelm Ostwald, Piere Duhem are among Bottazzi's preferred authors. Giovanni Landucci oversimplifies Bottazzi's epistemological orientation in asserting that: ‘Il y en eut qui spéculèrent sur la crise du modèle mécaniciste du XIXe siècle pour lancer des polémiques idéologiques, utilisant Mach, Poincaré et Duhem (ce fut le cas de Gemelli, Celesia, Bottazzi, Anile, etc.). Mais d'une manière générale les naturalistes italiens ne s'occupèrent pas d’épistémologie.’ See Landucci, G. (1996) Darwinisme italien. In Tort P. (ed.) Dictionnaire du darwinisme et de l’évolution (Paris: PUF), p. 1018.Google Scholar
57. Italian and foreign ‘positivist’ scientists were notoriously deeply interested in parapsychology, medianism and ‘spiritism’; see for example G. Scarpelli (1993) II cranio di cristallo (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri). Bottazzi became a member of the pioneer Italian psychic research organization, Società di Studi Psichici, founded in 1901. He held sittings with the famous medium Eusapia Paladino (or Palladino) in 1907. The manifestations, witnessed in the presence of professors De Amicis, Scarpa, and Pansini, were controlled by instruments. Bottazzi became convinced of the reality of the physical phenomena and declared: ‘The certitude we have acquired is of the same order as that which we attain from the study of chemical, physical or physiological facts.’ Two years later, he published his findings in a book – Bottazzi, F. (1909) Fenomeni medianici osservati in una serie di sedute fatte con Eusapia Paladino (Napoli: Perrella) . Reprinted by Schena ed. (Fasano, 1996); later on, he never again returned to this topic. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned book was only recently republished, in 1996, then years after the complete edition of his studies on Leonardo as a scientist (F. Bottazzi (1986) Leonardo scienziato, edited by L. Donatelli, F. Ghiretti and A. Russo (Napoli: Giannini: Società Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti)). For an English synthesis, see A. Giuditta (2009) The 1907 PK experiments by Prof. Filippo Bottazzi. Proceedings of The 8th European SSE Meeting (13–16 August 2009, Viterbo, Italy), pp. 30–51: URL www.sintropia.it/sse/Google Scholar
59. Rignano began with sociology and economics and then turned to problems in biology and psychology. He places memory at the basis of all biological phenomena, believing it to make possible all adaptations and the formation of instincts and emotions an even (following Mach) the reason. He distinguished constructive from intentional reasoning. The former seeks new truths and characterizes positive science; the latter seeks confirmation of what is already believed and characterizes metaphysics. See Brown, S., Collison, D. and Wilkinson, R. (eds) (1996) Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers (London and New York: Routledge).Google Scholar
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68. ‘The first of these is inadmissible both on philosophical and scientific grounds. Bernard Bosanquet best expresses the former attitude. […] “Things are not teleological – he said – because they are de facto purposed but necessary to be purposed because they are teleological… The foundations of teleology in the universe are far too deeply laid to be accounted for by, still less restricted to the intervention of finite consciousness…. The contrast, then, of mechanism with teleology is not to be treated as if elucidated at one blow by the antithesis of purposive consciousness and the reactions of part on part. It is rooted in the very nature of totality …” […] But Rignano's arguments are unsatisfactory also from a scientific angle, and here the objection comes from Lawrence J. Henderson, whose book, The Fitness of the Environment […] is never referred to by Rignano. […] His conclusion was that living animal and plants exit in an environment just as fitted for them as they are for it, that the Darwinian concept of fitness works, indeed, both ways… so that every teleological action done by any individual organism bears upon it the image and superscription of the universal teleology.’ See Needham, J. (1931) Chemical Embryology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 17–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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