The aim of the presentation is to blend together what are usually separate academic fields – literary studies, life sciences, mathematics, and logic – within the framework of the informal aspects of scholarly activity. The main claim is that due to their informal interactions in both the public and the private sphere (cafés, homes, student theater, private seminars, radio studies, wartime “flying universities,” etc.) scholars from different academic fields have blended different modes of domain-specific practice and methodology: e.g., literary scholars used the laboratory model of academic cooperation derived from the life sciences; medicine developed new ways of popularizing academic knowledge (public understating of knowledge) based on humanities activism in the public sphere, etc. However, this is not a story from contemporary academia, but from East and Central Europe during the interwar period and World War II. Dramatis personæ: Rudolf Weigl, Ludwik Fleck, Alfred Tarski, Stanisław Ulam, Stefan Banach, Manfred Kridl, etc., with Lwow (Lviv) and Wilno (Vilnius) as the crucial setting for this drama.