Between 1880 and 1920 the medical quest to unearth the causes of disease saw two pathbreaking discoveries. One was the bacteriological revolution – the identification of specific germs as causal agents of specific diseases (anthrax, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera and so on), and the simultaneous effort to develop disinfection techniques and immunisation measures to combat these diseases. The other was the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of heredity and the resulting emergence of medical genetics, where an entire set of medical maladies (deafness, blindness, bodily deformities, haemophilia, Huntington’s chorea, feeble-mindedness and many mental diseases) were identified – rightly or wrongly – as genetically determined. The ‘germ theory of disease’ and the ‘gene theory of disease’ shared striking, all-too-often overlooked similarities. Both theories built on shared epistemological assumptions that influenced their explanatory mechanisms and their overall conceptual frameworks; both mobilised similar visual and linguistic vocabulary; both appropriated – and enforced – prevailing cultural and gender norms; and both enshrined broadly parallel hygienic practices. Reflecting similar social concerns, medical bacteriology and medical genetics acquired kindred scientific and societal configurations, which this paper highlights and scrutinises.

A natural topology on the set of germs of holomorphic functions on a compact subset $K$ of a Fréchet space is the locally convex inductive limit topology of the spaces $\mathcal{O}(\sOm)$ endowed with the compact open topology; here $\sOm$ is any open subset containing $K$. Mujica gave a description of this space as the inductive limit of a suitable sequence of compact subsets. He used a set of intricate semi-norms for this. We give a projective characterization of this space, using simpler semi-norms, whose form is similar to the one used in the Whitney Extension Theorem for $C_\infty$ functions. They are quite natural in a framework where extensions are involved. We also give a simple proof that this topology is strictly stronger than the topology of the projective limit of the non-quasi-analytic spaces.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification: Primary 46A13; 46F15

We develop the theory of germs of generic functions in simple theories. Starting with an algebraic quadrangle (or other similar hypotheses), we obtain an “almost” generic group chunk, where the product is defined up to a bounded number of possible values. This is the first step towards the proof of the group configuration theorem for simple theories, which is completed in [3].