University of California, San Diego, Department of Philosophy, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0119, USA.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2011;33(1):105-27.
The chemical characterization of the substance responsible for the phenomenon of "transformation" of pneumococci was presented in the now famous 1944 paper by Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty. Reception of this work was mixed. Although interpreting their results as evidence that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the molecule responsible for genetic changes was, at the time, controversial, this paper has been retrospectively celebrated as providing such evidence. The mixed and changing assessment of the evidence presented in the paper was due to the work's interpretive flexibility--the evidence was interpreted in various ways, and such interpretations were justified given the neophytic state of molecular biology and methodological limitations of Avery's transformation studies. I argue that the changing context in which the evidence presented by Avery's group was interpreted partly explains the vicissitudes of the assessments of the evidence. Two less compelling explanations of the reception are a myth-making account and an appeal to the wartime historical context of its publication.
艾弗里、麦克莱德和麦卡蒂在那篇如今著名的 1944 年论文中，介绍了导致肺炎球菌“转化”现象的物质的化学特征。这一工作的反响褒贬不一。尽管当时将其研究结果解读为脱氧核糖核酸（DNA）是导致遗传变化的分子，颇具争议，但这篇论文后来被誉为提供了此类证据。由于该论文的证据具有解释上的灵活性，即可以从各种角度对证据进行解读，而且鉴于分子生物学的新生状态和艾弗里转化研究方法上的局限性，这种解读是有道理的，因此人们对论文中呈现的证据的评估褒贬不一，意见不一。我认为，艾弗里小组提出的证据在解释上的变化不定的语境部分解释了对证据的评估为何如此反复无常。对该论文的接受情况，还有另外两种不太有说服力的解释，一种是神话制造论，另一种是诉诸其发表时的战时历史背景。
