Ludwik Fleck was born in Lemberg and grew up in the cultural autonomy of the Austrian province of Galicia.
15 Facts About Ludwik Fleck
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Ludwik Fleck graduated from a Polish lyceum in 1914 and enrolled at Lwow's Jan Kazimierz University, where he received his medical degree.
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From 1923 to 1935 Ludwik Fleck worked in the department of internal medicine at Lwow General Hospital, then became director of the bacteriological laboratory at the local social security authority.
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Ludwik Fleck continued his research in the hospital and developed a new procedure in which he procured a vaccine from the urine of typhus patients.
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Ludwik Fleck's work was known to the German occupiers, and his family were arrested in December 1942 and sent to the Laokoon pharmaceutical factory to produce a typhus serum.
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Ludwik Fleck's task was to diagnose syphilis, typhus, and other illnesses using serological tests.
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From December 1943 until the liberation of Poland on 11 April 1945, Ludwik Fleck was detained in Buchenwald concentration camp; there he worked with Marian Ciepielowski to produce a working typhus vaccine for camp inmates, while producing a fake vaccine for the SS.
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In 1956, after a heart attack and the discovery that he was suffering from lymphosarcoma, Ludwik Fleck emigrated to Israel, where a position was created for him at the Israel Institute for Biological Research.
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Ludwik Fleck died in 1961, aged 64, of a second heart attack.
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The Ludwik Fleck Prize is awarded annually for the best book in the field of science and technology studies.
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Ludwik Fleck wrote that the development of truth in scientific research was an unattainable ideal, since researchers are locked into thought collectives.
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In Ludwik Fleck's work, thought style is closely associated with representational style.
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Ludwik Fleck argues that within the cultural style of a thought collective, knowledge claims or facts are constrained by passive elements arising from observations and experience of the natural world.
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Ludwik Fleck felt that the development of scientific facts and concepts is not unidirectional and does not consist only of accumulating new pieces of information, but at times requires changing older concepts, methods of observation, and forms of representation.
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Ludwik Fleck noted some features of the culture of modern natural sciences that recognize provisionality and evolution of knowledge along the value of pursuit of passive resistances.