generating what was there

Bettina Bock von Wülfingen (ed.)

TRACES GENERATING WHAT WAS THERE

Bettina Bock von Wülfingen (ed.)

TRACES GENERATING WHAT WAS THERE

Bettina Bock von Wülfingen (ed.)

TRACES GENER ATING WHAT WAS THERE

This publication was made possible by the Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory Cluster of Excellence at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (sponsor number EXC 1027/1) with financial support from the German Research Foundation as a part of the Excellence Initiative.

A German language edition is also available: Bettina Bock von Wülfingen (ed.): Spuren. Erzeugung des Dagewesenen, Berlin/Boston 2017, Bildwelten des Wissens 13 (ISBN 978-3-11-047650-7)

Copy-editing Rainer Hörmann, Jim Baker Typesetting and design Andreas Eberlein, Berlin Printing and binding DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH, Altenburg ISBN 978-3-11-053478-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-053506-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-053483-2 © 2017 Walter De Gruyter GmbH Berlin/Boston www.degruyter.com This publication, including all parts thereof, is legally protected by copyright. Any use, exploitation or commercialization outside the narrow limits set by copy­right legislation, without the publisher’s consent, is illegal and liable to ­prosecution. This applies in particular to photostat reproduction, copying, scanning or duplication of any kind, translation, preparation of microfilms, electronic data processing, and storage such as making this publication available on Internet.

7 EDITORIAL 11 IMAGE DESCRIPTION Kathrin Friedrich Layers of Operation. Lars Leksell’s Neurosurgical Planning Image

15 John A. Nyakatura Description, Experiment, and Model. Reading Traces in Paleobiological Research Exemplified by a Morpho-functional Analysis

IMAGE DESCRIPTION 29 Kathrin M. Amelung, Thomas Stach Visualizing Viruses. Notes on David S. Goodsell’s Scientific Illustrations and Their Use in Molecular Biology between Picture Model and Trace



35 Dieter G. Weiss, Günther Jirikowski, Stefanie Reichelt Microscopic Imaging. Interference, Intervention, Objectivity

55 Soraya de Chadarevian “It is not enough, in order to understand the Book of Nature, to turn over the pages looking at the pictures. Painful though it may be, it will be necessary to learn to read the text.” Visual Evidence in the Life Sciences, c. 1960

65 Bettina Bock von Wülfingen Giving a Theory a Material Body. Staining Technique and the “Autarchy of the Nucleus” since 1876

INTERVIEW 75 Traces and Patterns. Pictures of Interferences and Collisions in the Physics Lab.  A Dialogue between Dr. Anne Dippel and Dr. Lukas Mairhofer



89 Barbara Orland Liquid or Globular? On the History of Gestalt-seeing in the Life Sciences of the Early 19th Century



99 Marietta Kesting Traces of Bodies and Operational Portraits. On the Construction of Pictorial Evidence



111 Sophia Kunze Reduced Complexity or Essentialism? Medical Knowledge and “Reading Traces” in the History of Art

IMAGE CREDITS 121

123 AUTHORS

EDITORIAL

On April 28, 1906, a patient named Auguste D. died in the Clinic for Lunatics and Epileptics in Frankfurt am Main. The physician Alois Alzheimer had been closely following the course of her illness since she was admitted in 1901; although he had left the clinic, he was immediately informed of her death. Her confused behavior and speech seemed paradigmatic to him for his idea that a confused state did not necessarily have to be an expression of syphilis in all the individuals who were referred to him. In this case, Alzheimer combined patient observation with histological findings and publications. After Auguste D.’s death, her brain was sent from Frankfurt to Alzheimer’s new place of work, the Royal Psychiatric Clinic in Munich. He made sections of the cerebral cortex that had already been fixed in alcohol in Frankfurt, which he then treated with different methods of staining. The stains and preparations further fixated the material, temporally storing the time of Auguste D.’s death. Through these stains, numerous plaques and fibrils became visible in and between the nerve cells: The color chemicals adhered to them, causing light-refracting densities to develop in the tissue. These were visible with a magnifying glass and a backlight. Such condensations didn’t emerge – using the same coloring method – in the brain material of a deceased person not suffering from this type of dementia. Alzheimer described them as changes in the cerebral tissue and considered them the cause of Auguste D.’s confused behavior and speech, which could be described as typical for her case and similar cases. Shortly afterwards, he published the case history together with the findings as a specific illness that, at the suggestion of his superior, hospital director Emil Kraepelin, would later bear the name “Alzheimer’s Disease.” This is not the end of the story of the traces of Auguste D.’s dementia: In December 1995, the long-sought medical report on Auguste D. was rediscovered in the basement of the now modern clinic in Frankfurt, and two years later the original preparations were recovered in Munich by the neuropathologists Mehraein and Graeber. There was great interest in whether the categorization of Auguste D.’s case as an Alzheimer’s case – the case from which the disease takes its name – would stand up to today’s criteria. In addition, a few years after Konrad Kujau forged The Hitler Diaries, the question arose as to whether these were the original preparations made by Alzheimer on the specimen slides.

8

Editorial

1: Alzheimer’s preparation “Deter,” numbering by Graeber.

In order to prove that these were indeed the long-sought preparations more than a hundred years after their production as trace carriers, Graeber had the police apply a technique from the area of criminology to verify the age of the ink used on the glass of the slides. Experts also compared the signature on Alzheimer’s handwritten CV, which could be clearly attributed to him, with the writing on the slides. This additional trace production and trace reading demonstrated that it must have been Alzheimer himself who left these particular traces. Alzheimer’s preparations are still temporal evidence even a century after their production, albeit in a different way than in the cut preparation. This had previously been a picture that could be experienced three-dimensionally with a height-adjustable microscope, but now a molecule in the preparation, which had not been significant in Alzheimer’s trace production, became the center of interest: the DNA of the former patient. To obtain the DNA, preparations were removed from the slides; the image was destroyed, and the DNA was amplified and analyzed using chemically elaborate, now robotized, methods. Computer-generated images and printouts presented the gene sequence as letters and graphs.

Editorial

9

The history of the traces of Alzheimer’s disease in Auguste D.’s brain preparations has continued for more than one hundred years and reveals – despite all the differences in the technical approaches – consistencies in the foundations of the various procedures: Traces hold time as a form. Then as now, it is not actually the traces that are sought, but rather a reference to something that had been there. However, the reference remains: Not what is sought is revealed, but an event related in a particular way to the desired one – the adhesion of color molecules, the signing of a CV, the electrical reaction of certain amino acids as the constituents of the patient’s DNA. Examining trace production shows that the traces first convince the researchers themselves, but also a particular audience. Temporal storage is also required to present the trace of what was previously seen. The persistent absence of what was sought shows the specific epistemic continuity of many traces read and produced in the laboratory during the last century. In microscopic images and in the particle accelerator CERN, which can be described as a large microscope, maps are produced with the aid of traces, which give us orientation. At least if the maps are good, because in that case the traces replace the actually sought, which eventually fades into oblivion. Bettina Bock von Wülfingen

Traces keep time and make the past visible. As such, they continue to be a fundamental resource for scientific knowledge production in modernity. While the art of trace reading is a millennia-old practice, tracings are specifically produced in the photographic archive or in the scientific laboratory. The material traces of the forms represent the objects and causes to which they owe their existence while making them invisible in the moment of their visualization. By looking at different techniques for the production of traces and their changes over two centuries, the contributions show the continuities they have equally in the laboratories as in large colliders of particle physics. This volume, inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s early works, formulates a theory of traces for the 21st century.

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ISBN 978-3-11-053478-8

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