Theodor Boveri and the natural experiment

SummaryThe philosopher Ludwig Wittengenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that his reader should reach the point where “he must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it”. To put it another way, once one is certain about something, the process by which that certainty was achieved does not really matter anymore. This statement could perhaps also be applied to the progress of scientific knowledge. Once a scientific fact is revealed or a process is understood, the means by which it was established become of secondary importance. All too often those means are forgotten, as are the people who made the steps possible. To achieve everlasting scientific fame, it seems your name has to be tied to a single, straightforward advance: a conceptual breakthrough, as in the case of Darwin, or a clear-cut discovery, like that of Gregor Mendel.