Plasmogeny and the artificial synthesis of protoplasm: the epistemological, historical and scientific contributions of Luis Alfonso Herrera

• Grant number: 14/09664-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: August 11, 2014
• End date: November 10, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Epistemology
• Principal Investigator: Mauricio de Carvalho Ramos
• Grantee: Mauricio de Carvalho Ramos
• Host Investigator: Carlos López Beltrán
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Coyoacán (UNAM), Mexico

Abstract

In this project, I present an investigation of scientific, epistemological and historical aspects of the plasmogenetic project created by Mexican biologist and chemist Luis Alfonso Herrera (1868 - 1943). First, I will develop the idea that plasmogeny involves the concept of a science that merges with the object of its study. In this association is essential the fact that the science synthesizes or produces its object. As in genetics, the concept of plasmogeny operacionality and intelligibility are internally connected. In continuation to this first question, my second proposal is to understand more deeply the meaning of this intelligibility conceiving it as a product of a more general scientific culture in which the concepts of morphology and form are central. This culture is identified in historical and conceptual parameters within the project of Herrera where it was born and flourished (late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century). Finally, I will discuss the concept of protoplasm according to the meaning that it receive of the Herrera's plasmogeny concept. Plasmogeny is the genesis of a plasm endowed with certain character of "firstness", ie, the concept must be in equal measure associated with the origin of remote and present life - with the ancient spontaneous generation and the contemporary synthesis of life in the laboratory. In all these process, it would be involved the existence of probios as elementary organic beings belong to a protobial kingdom on the border between the inorganic and organic. In summary, I propose a project whose development will be put in interaction the previous three particular proposal as follows: enhancing the scientific, epistemological and historical aspects of the concepts of protoplasm and plasmogeny I specified in order to create a mutual determination that makes increasingly more intelligible the relation of the two concepts; concomitantly, augment this intelligibility posing this relations in a morphology or general theory of organic forms as part of scientific culture that allowed Herrera to create his important scientific and philosophical work. (AU)