The Development of Retrovirology as Intellectual History

by John Coffin, Stephen Hughes, Harold Varmus

Thomas Kuhn, in his classical 1962 essay on the structure of scientific revolutions, laid out the criteria and the tools for a historical analysis of scientific developments (Kuhn 1962). The fundamental idea behind Kuhn's method is that scientific development is not gradual and accumulative but that periods of steady advance referred to as normal science are punctuated by discontinuities, scientific revolutions, and changes of the ruling paradigms. These are not mere sudden quantitative advances in knowledge, they are replacements of the elementary framework, the paradigms, under which a scientific field operates. Scientific revolutions can be major, affecting our view of the world, but they can also be less encompassing, and some may interest only the scientists working in a defined field. Whatever the extent of a paradigm change, what all scientists have in common is that they shape the character of a field and define the problems that should be worked on. Successive paradigms are largely incompatible. Much of the old is, however, accepted into the new era, although often reinterpreted to comply with the new paradigm. Paradigm changes do not happen spontaneously but are caused by crisis. A crisis may be acute, in which the old paradigms fail to lead to solutions of significant and pressing current problems, or it may be chronic, smoldering, manifested mainly in a lack of substantive progress.

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Published January 1, 1997