1882 · Robert Koch
Die Aetiologie der Tuberkulose
What this work is
Koch's 1882 paper on the cause of tuberculosis. He stained tuberculous tissue from people and animals and found the same rods in every case, grew the rods alone on blood serum, and made healthy animals sick by injecting the cultures. He concludes that the rod, the tubercle bacillus, causes tuberculosis.
Then and now
Koch found the same rods in every tuberculous organ, grew them alone, and made healthy animals sick with the cultures. Germ theory cites the paper as proof that a bacterium causes tuberculosis, and dropped his own rules when they later failed. Nobody has seen a rod enter a cell and cause the disease.
Verdict
UNSCIENTIFIC
The work follows the scientific method inside its paradigm. The paradigm itself does not pass. The worse layer decides. The verdict is unscientific.
1·This work · inside the paradigm
SCIENTIFIC
Follows the scientific method within Germ Theory.
2·Paradigm · Germ Theory
UNSCIENTIFIC
Fails the tests. The worse layer decides.
How the verdict is decided
The verdict grades both layers: the paradigm this work assumes, and how the work was carried out inside it. Both must be scientific for the whole thing to be scientific. A clean method inside an unscientific paradigm is unscientific. An unscientific method inside a better paradigm is unscientific. A split on either layer is mixed. The worse layer decides.
1·This work
Did this work test its claim with methods that are independent, falsifiable, and non-circular?
SCIENTIFIC
This study claims a specific bacterium causes tuberculosis, shown by the same rods in every tuberculous organ, pure cultures grown from them, and disease produced in healthy animals by those cultures. All three tests pass.
Independently Verifiable
Pass
A stranger can look through the lens and see the rods, and can watch the inoculated animals waste and die while the controls stay well.
Falsifiable
Pass
Animals injected with rod-free or dried or alcohol-soaked material stayed healthy, so the opposite outcome was built into the runs and reported.
Non-Circular
Pass
The animals were called tuberculous by the old visible nodules that existed before the bacillus was named, so the stain was not grading its own definition.
Why
Rods under the lens and animals wasting after inoculation are visible. Animals given rod-free, dried, or alcohol-soaked material stayed healthy, so the opposite result was built into his runs. The animals were judged tuberculous by the old visible nodules, so the stain was not grading its own definition. The verdict falls at the paradigm, which reads the rods as the cause.
2·Paradigm · Germ Theory
Does the framework this work assumes pass the three tests?
UNSCIENTIFIC
Independently Verifiable
Fail
A stranger sees stained shapes in a lens and animals that sicken after an injection; that a shape is the cause of a disease is the model's reading of that pairing.
Falsifiable
Fail
When the same germs later turned up in people who stayed well, the field called them carriers and latent infections rather than counting that against the claim.
Non-Circular
Fail
The field's stains, cultures, and tests were built to find the organisms the model already blamed, and a positive result is then called proof the organism caused the disease.
Why
The framework began from events anyone could watch, and this very paper is the best of them: rods in a lens, animals sickening after inoculation, controls left alone. Koch himself said the constant presence of the rods proved nothing without culture and reinfection. The field kept the framework and dropped that demand. Germs found in healthy bodies became carrier states and latent infection. Disease without a germ became post-infectious or sterile processes. The diagnostic instruments, from Koch's stain to today's amplification tests, were designed from the organisms the model blamed, and the field now defines the disease by the test built to detect it, which is the loop Koch's animal experiment had briefly avoided. The framework names the detected organism as the disease. It does not ask what made that animal or that person susceptible in the first place, which is the question the model has no instrument for.
From the work
Aus diesem Zusammentreffen von tuberkulöser Affektion und Bazillen folgt indessen noch nicht, daß diese beiden Erscheinungen in einem ursächlichen Zusammenhange stehen
auch nicht ein einziges von den geimpften Tieren erkrankte, während die mit bazillenhaltigen Massen geimpften ausnahmslos vier Wochen nach der Impfung schon hochgradig tuberkulös waren.
Zweitens blieben die Kontrolltiere, welche genau in derselben Weise wie die infizierten Tiere behandelt wurden, nur mit dem einzigen Unterschied, daß sie keine Bazillenkultur erhielten, gesund.