Behavioral Pioneers
Jacques Loeb
April 7, 1859 - February 11, 1924
German-born American Physiologist
Jacques Loeb, an early 20th century physiologist, espoused a very deeply empirical and anti-metaphysical viewpoint. For Loeb, scientific investigation was a kind of engineering enterprise. He wrote numerous works on biology and physiology including The Organism as Whole, From a Physicochemical Viewpoint (1916) and the radically objective Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology (1900). He is probably best known now for his work on artificial parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) and his belief that living organisms could be created in the laboratory.
Loeb’s work in physiology and his philosophy had a direct impact on the careers and theoretical perspectives of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner. After John B. Watson failed to make a good intellectual connection with John Dewey, his intended mentor at the University of Chicago, Watson considered studying the physiology of the dog’s brain with Loeb. He instead opted to work with functionalist psychologist James Angell and physiologist Henry Donaldson. Loeb’s work and philosophy were nevertheless important factors in guiding Watson’s ideas about the broader applications of science. William Crozier, who would later become B.F. Skinner’s defacto graduate mentor was a student of Loeb. Skinner had arrived at Harvard without much formal training in biology or psychology--but having read Loeb’s Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology (1900) and The Organism as Whole (1916) as a Hamilton College undergraduate. Gregory Pincus, also a student of Crozier at the about the same time as Skinner, went on to invent the birth control pill. Loeb and his students (by association) suffered from the deeply ingrained anti-Semitism of the time.
More information about Loeb can be found in Philip Pauly’s excellent 1987 biography of Loeb, Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology. (New York: Oxford).
Loeb collage by James T. Todd
