Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 226-229. (Budapest, 1914)
TANULMÁNYOK - Elek Gábor: 2013-ban volt Bauer Ervin halálának 75. évfordulója
2013 WAS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF ERVIN BAUER’S DEATH GÁBOR ELEK Introduction Science minded people commonly remember Lotka, Rashevsky, Bertalanffy and Haldane etc. when they are speaking about the foundation of theoretical biology (see Alt et al. 2010). In similar Russian (or Elungarian) works Ervin Bauer's name is perhaps mentioned too (see Tokin 1965). Why is Bauer omitted in most cases? The usual explanation is that Bauer’s principal work: Theoretical Biology (Eaysp 2002) did not enter the pool of widely known scientific books due to its publication in Russian. The political system in the earlier Soviet Union (and the author’s tragic life) banned not only the translation but also even the circulation of this work (see Müller 2005) before the fifties of the last century. This explanation can be accepted. Bauer, however, published a short and early version of his theoretical work in German (Grundprinzipien...in the following Fundamentals, Bauer 1920), which already in 1920 contained his significant principle about permanent nonequilibrium of living matter (see Elek and Müller 2013). How could it happen, that Bauer’s memory totally faded away from the western biological literature? This is the question I attempt to answer in the following. The colloid chemistry became dominant in biology in the 20s of last century Bauer was not an acknowledged scientific person yet when he put down the first version of his principle. In the early 20th Century there was no generally adopted theory of the organism. Nevertheless we need to remember that this period saw high theoretical activities and intense debates in the last resort between the adherents of vitalism and those of mechanicism. A thousand different individual opinions, personally coloured in varying degrees between vitalists and mechanics, confronted one another among which a given reasoner could choose according to his personal taste and the requirements of his special sphere (see Bertalanffy 1932 1-4., 44-47.). Following the pioneering work of Driesch a number of ‘theoretical biology’s’ were penned, this became a fashionable enterprise. Some were multivolume treatises and some were thin, less than 100 pages long. The theoretical biology was, however, by no means generally recognised science yet. Voices were often raised in rejection of theoretical biology as ’merely philosophical’ or ’speculative’ and superfluous. The experimentation was thought to be something superior and only the adjoining experimental approach could overcome the aversion to a theory and lend to it the legitimate pride. Bauer in this stage of his life was neither an experimentalist nor a theoretician yet; he was pathologist. He abandoned, however, his career (Elek- Müller 2006) and he was an expatriate
