Chemiosmosis

These are amongst the most imaginative achievements of the scientific mind.

Two of them, the chemiosmotic theory and the clonal selection theory of adaptive immunity, are particularly noteworthy.

They proposed mechanisms for two fundamental processes of life, how cells generate energy to power themselves and how the body mounts a defense against pathogens, before any pre-existing analogs were known.

What were the reasoning paths that led to these theories? Can they be traced at all? It is rarely acknowledged to what extent biologists' broader philosophical commitments guide their theoretical thinking.

In both, the scientists' philosophical background allowed them to break away from existing theoretical frameworks and offer their own, at first seemingly outlandish and bizarre, but later ultimately experimentally validated, theories.

By examining the ideas they borrowed and assumptions they questioned, we can begin to understand how such feats of imagination become feasible and learn to make others.

The next section is called Chemiosmotic Theory.

The British biochemist Peter Mitchell formulated his chemiosmotic theory of oxidative phosphorylation in 1961 without a shred of experimental evidence.

But it's, it's just part of the foundation, right? Anything to add there?

Well, yeah, I was gonna say, like I kinda took a detour at one point, and I was a, I was a high school science teacher, and we were talking about this earlier, but it's funny to me, like as a teach- when I was a teacher, and students would come to me and they're freaking out because they don't know what like, you know, chemiosmosis is, but they're like 15 years old.

And I'm like, "Yeah, when I was 15 years old, I didn't know what it e- was either." And I just had to say, like these professors, like the lectures they give, we were talking about this earlier, like this is what they do.

This is their livelihood.