• Laurent Cherlonneix.
• Centre Marc Bloch, CNRS/MAE, USR 3130, Schiffbauerdamm 19, D-10117 Berlin. cherlonneix@t-online.de
• Gesnerus. 2007 Jan 1;64(3-4):193-218.

AbstractAt the end of the 19th century, research on cell Death in France and Germany was not simply forgotten by contemporary research but in this context it appears that the growing power of cell theory together with an ancient philosophical "superiority" of life over death hijacked more surely the attention of the discoverers--among whom Vogt--of self-initiation of cell Death than the contemporary forgetting of biologists of "programmed" cell Death along with their "incapacity" to read in German. So the work of the Pasteurian Metchnikoff on muscular phagocytosis anticipates on the one hand the equivocity of factors that are disclosed in the framework of recent research. But Metchnikoff did not take advantage of it for theoretical consequences of the duality--normal and pathological--of muscular phagocytosis because this was not his aim. The research by Noetzel in Halle on self-dismantling of tadpole tails during the development does not contradict this perspective. Self-initiation of cell Death towards the end of the 19th century deals with cellular and intracellular levels but it leads to observations done with the microscope and not to inferences at molecular level. The thinness of these older observations is not really contradicted or repeated by contemporary research. It designs a field of observations that has its autonomy in comparison with actual issues on cell Death. On the contrary, the Weismann-Goette debate is closer to today. Behind the opposition of organisms that would be immortals and organisms whose mortality would lie in the necessity to reproduce themselves with the intention to rejuvenate, appears a debate initiated at that time and which now comes to its maturity between Darwinians who support a secondary death and those who support a more equivocal conception where Life and Death associate in depth but still do not mix.

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