His account of the development of facts at the intersection of active elements of the thought collective and the passive resistances of nature provides a way of considering the particular culture of modern science as evolutionary and evidence-oriented.
[8] Fleck was born in Lemberg (Lwów in Polish, now L'viv, Ukraine) and grew up in the cultural autonomy of the Austrian province of Galicia.
He graduated from a Polish lyceum (secondary school) in 1914 and enrolled at Lwów's Jan Kazimierz University, where he received his medical degree.
From 1923 to 1935 Fleck worked in the department of internal medicine at Lwów General Hospital, then became director of the bacteriological laboratory at the local social security authority.
With Nazi Germany's occupation of L'viv, Fleck was deported with his wife, Ernestina Waldmann, and son Ryszard to the city's Jewish ghetto.
Fleck's work was known to the German occupiers and his family were arrested in December 1942 and deported to the Laokoon pharmaceutical factory to produce a typhus serum.
He argued, however, that within the active cultural style of a thought collective, knowledge claims or facts were constrained by passive elements arising from the observations and experience of the natural world.