Reviewed by: Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science by Tara Abraham Katja Guenther Tara Abraham. Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017. 320 pp. Ill. $40.00 (978-0262035095). It may seem strange that a book on cybernetics should be reviewed in a journal on the history of medicine. After all, cybernetics is most often associated with technology and the physical sciences, where a study of regulatory systems helped explain processes of communication and control. In the decades after WWII, cybernetics was embraced for its military and political applications, which explains the field’s links with US military research. But, as historians of science are becoming increasingly aware, the multidisciplinary reach of cybernetics extends far beyond the physical sciences; cybernetics can also boast a complex relationship with the life sciences, not least the science and medicine of the brain and nervous system.1 The pressing historiographical question then becomes: how can we understand the interaction between these seemingly divergent fields in the development of cybernetic ideas and practice? Tara Abraham, in her Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science, answers this question by turning to biography, telling the complex story of cybernetics through the peripatetic life of one of its founders. McCulloch seems an ideal choice. A key player at the Macy conferences on cybernetics (1946–53), McCulloch followed a remarkably varied scientific itinerary. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in philosophy and psychology at Yale, he moved on to earn a Master’s degree in psychology at Columbia, as well as an M.D. After that, he worked in the fields of experimental neurology at Columbia and neurophysiology at Yale, where he collaborated with Dusser de Barenne, followed by several years as a research psychiatrist at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute. His identity as a neuropsychiatrist, Abraham tells us, was only “eclipsed” due to the massive rise in prominence of cybernetics during the later 40s and early 1950s (p. 149). In 1952, McCulloch moved to MIT where, in close collaboration with Walter Pitts and Jerome Lettvin, his former students/colleagues at Illinois, he worked on developing theoretical models of the brain, all the while continuing to write poetry, an early passion. At various moments then, McCulloch assumed the roles of poet, philosopher, neurophysiologist, neuropsychiatrist, cybernetician, and engineer. Abraham gives us the fullest understanding to date of one of the most important figures in twentieth-century cybernetics. Drawing on an impressive range of sources including published papers, institutional and personal archives, and interviews with McCulloch’s son and former colleagues, Abraham presents a vivid portrait of a man who—living on a diet of whiskey and ice cream—was remarkable not only for his scientific ideas, but also for his pedagogical style, which emphasized equal relations with even much younger colleagues. The productive relationships that McCulloch nurtured with his students informed his work in decisive ways, which is clear from the canonical 1943 paper co-authored with the logician Pitts: “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” The paper [End Page 223] uses theoretical modeling as a basis for understanding brain function. Because neurons in their neurophysiological workings can be understood as functioning according to an all-or-none principle (the neuron provides a uniform response to any stimulus above a certain threshold), they could be modeled according to the principles of logic. The collaboration with the mathematically gifted Pitts allowed McCulloch to present and develop his anti-dualist position. The central pay-off of Abraham’s biographical research is its contribution to our understanding of cybernetics. Building on existing literature that emphasizes the multi-disciplinary nature of the field, and paying attention to the contingencies of funding structures, institutional contexts, and personal relations, Abraham draws our attention to the interrelations between cybernetics and the life and medical sciences, not simply as fields to which insights from the physical sciences were applied (as, for instance in the vision of Norbert Wiener), but as driving forces of scientific inquiry. Ironically, this work leads Abraham to examine the limits of transdisciplinarity, for the man as well as for cybernetics. For while at first glance, McCulloch’s...
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Feb 6, 2019
Michael Caie 
Open Access