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HSS 2000 Abstracts If you would like to modify your abstract, please e-mail changes to hssexec@u.washington.edu.
Karen A. Rader Sarah Lawrence
College This paper will draw on the author's experience teaching a course devoted exclusively to "Science and Film". Many history of science scholars have successfully incorporated film into their teaching of topical courses. But few have explored the history of film itself as a topic that enables exploration of a broader set of issues related to the political and cultural meanings of visual representation, both in science and society-at-large. These issues include: how technological advances in film (still photography and motion pictures) have contributed to new understandings of scientific knowledge why film has been such a potent resource for shaping public understandings of the scientific enterprise and ultimately, what have been, are, and could be the relations between science and art as cultural activities. Specific pedagogical strategies for addressing such themes will be discussed, along with suggestions for how to encourage students to incorporate their study of these themes practically across the often-competing curriculums of science and creative arts. Peter J. Ramberg Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science In presenting the experimental results in support of the new principles of stereochemistry, the organic chemist Johannes Wislicenus (1835-1902) entered disputes with both Rudolf Fittig (1835-1910) and Arthur Michael (1853-1942) about the correct reaction conditions for the addition of halogens to multiple bonds. Whereas Fittig and Michael disagreed with Wislicenus for different reasons, both accused Wislicenus of performing chemical reactions under the wrong external conditions. Wislicenus returned this accusation, claiming that it was Michael and Fittig who executed these reactions under "abnormal" conditions. In this paper, I will briefly recount this episode and its eventual resolution, and explore the parallels between this story and several recently published case studies treating the historical processes behind giving authority to a scientific instrument such as Newton‚s prisms or Boyle's air pump. The story of Wislicenus, Fittig and Michael, in which the authority of no instrument in a conventional sense was at stake, suggests a reconsideration of the nature of instruments in chemistry, and the limitations on the historiographical assumptions behind the concept of making instruments "transparent." Nicolas Rasmussen It is widely considered that the Second World War marks a discontinuity for both physical and life sciences, in that large numbers of basic researchers were brought together in well-funded government research projects for the accomplishment of practical military goals, initiating a transition to the postwar era of 'big science'. This paper discusses wartime research on the cortical hormones, one of the largest of both the OSRD Committee on Medical Research and Committee on Chemistry, which despite failure to meet its wartime goals led to the postwar introduction of the archetypical miracle-drug cortisone. Analysis of the sharing of information and division of labor both within the basic life science research community, and between biomedical research institutions and commercial contractors, points instead to a continuity of the manner of life scientist-industrialist relations throughout the war period. This finding suggests that the degree to which many areas of life science in the interwar period were already organized on a large scale and oriented toward industrial application has been generally underestimated. Benjamin W. Redekop Kettering
University In this paper I argue that in responding to the "problem of induction" as advanced by David Hume, the influential eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid reformulated Aristotelian foundationalism in distinctly modern terms. An educator and mathematician self-consciously working within the framework of the new science, Reid articulated a philosophical foundation for natural knowledge anchored in the human constitution and in processes of adjudication in an emerging modern public sphere of enlightened discourse. In the process Reid transformed one of the traditional foundations of Aristotelian science - common experience - into a philosophically and socially justified notion of "common sense." The new science had challenged the primacy of common experience in favor of recondite, expert, and even counter-intuitive knowledge increasingly mediated by specialized instruments. Meanwhile modern philosophy had also problematized the perceptions of common experience - in the case of Hume this included our perception of causality itself, a fundamental precondition of scientific endeavor. I argue that these challenges to the traditional foundations of the scientific enterprise, along with the rise of "middling" classes and a modern public sphere, the concurrent rise of public science, and the belief that scientific knowledge was crucial to social advancement and development, lay behind Reid's reintegration of scientific knowledge and common experience, albeit now explicitly and in "scientific" terms. The paper draws on recent work by historians and sociologists of science (including among others Peter Dear, Lorraine Daston, Steven Shapin, Larry Stewart, Jan Golinski, and Mary Poovey), as well as on the literature of the modern public sphere stimulated by Habermas. It is grounded in a close reading of Reid's published texts and in extensive archival research in Reid's personal papers, and in the primary and secondary literature of the Scottish Enlightenment. Eileen Reeves Princeton
University The particulars of Galileo Galilei's several and conflicting accounts of his development of the Dutch telescope have often been treated with skepticism: the timing of the events of spring 1609, his optical expertise, the technical information relayed to the scientist by Jacques Badovere, and the degree of unacknowledged collaboration have all been subject to special scrutiny. What has been left unexamined, however, is the proposition that what Galileo and his informant Paolo Sarpi first understood by the earliest reports of a spyglass developed in The Hague actually bore great resemblance to the Dutch or refracting telescope. This paper will argue that Galileo was, like Sarpi, aware of news of the spyglass from late 1608, that their original impression of the instrument may have been something much closer to a primitive reflecting telescope, and that what Galileo portrayed as his relatively tardy acquaintance with the rumor from The Hague is better explained as a brief period in which he worked fruitlessly to refine the wrong technology. There are several reasons to suppose that Galileo and Sarpi would have associated telescopic properties with mirrors, or mirrors and glass lenses, rather than with glass lenses alone. Both men had done some research in catoptrics in the prior decades, the importance of which has recently been demonstrated by Sven Dupre. Moreover, in the same month in which he encountered the report of the Dutch telescope, Sarpi also read an account of a mirror with telescopic properties in the possession of Henri IV significantly, its alleged developer was in close contact with Jacques Badovere. Finally, because the motif of a telescopic mirror upon which the fortunes of an empire depended appeared quite commonly in European literature of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the apparent invention of just such an instrument in 1608 would have filled a preexistent and familiar cultural fantasy. Joan Richards Brown University In 1863, the London house of Longman, Green, Longman, published From Matter to Spirit by "CD" with a Preface by "AB," with the mathematical symbolism in ironic contrast with the spiritualist convictions in the book. Behind the AB stood Augustus De Morgan, the distinguished professor of mathematics at University College, London; behind the CD stood his wife, the socially active mother of their seven children. Augustus's "Preface" served as a defense of the intellectual legitimacy of his wife's report on a decade of investigation into the mid-Victorian world of channeling mediums, turning tables, and writing spirits. Augustus was unequivocal in his conviction about the events and experiments Sophia reported in her book: "I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen and heard in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual . . ." (v) Even as Augustus defended the legitimacy of his wife's experiences, however, he distanced himself from them, saying he would not "stand committed either for or against the conclusions of the book." (v) Augustus's ambivalent support for Sophia's work can be seen as an attempt to defend his reputation as a cool-headed scholar even as he used that reputation to protect his wife's investigations. But it was more than that. Sophia's book contained an interpretation of those incidents built on a view of language and truth diametrically opposed to the logical one he had been developing and defending for years. Augustus did not address his and Sophia's differences directly in his preface, but at its end he did recognize them with the comment: "Between us we have, in a certain way, cleared the dish; like that celebrated couple of whom one could eat no fat and the other no lean." (xlv) From Matter to Spirit appeared at the very beginning, if not before, the period in which Victorians and their historians have located the Victorian crisis of faith. What is more, neither Augustus nor Sophia would have claimed allegiance to the kind of religious faith that would support crises among their more orthodox compatriots. Nevertheless, the tension between the ways that they assigned meaning to words and events mirrors that which many of their somewhat younger compatriots faced within themselves. The Victorian crisis of faith is often interpreted as the product of an epistemological crisis. In this paper I want to use From Matter to Spirit to reconsider that crisis from the perspective of meaning as opposed to epistemology, to consider what supported Sophia's and Augustus's complementary worlds, and to explore what made their coexistence so difficult in the next generation. Robert J. Richards The
University of Chicago The historical antagonism between Darwinian theorists and the religiously minded has many sources, but Ernst Haeckel's virulently anti-religious stance, which became part of his many books and articles directed to the promotion of Darwinism, must be regarded as a primary cause. But why did Haeckel assume such a strident posture, a posture which not only antagonized religious believers but fellow scientists as well? He might have argued--as he initially did at the meeting of the Association of German Naturalist and Physicians in 1863--that God first breathed life into an original form, and natural processes produced the variety of life we now observe. Haeckel first wrote Darwin after the meeting, and received a very warm reception from the English scientist. But a short time later an event occurred that altered everything. After this event, Haeckel elevated his scientific convictions into a quasi-religious passion. In a white heat he composed his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, a two-volume exposition and defense of Darwinism that was written in vitriol. The battle against the forces of superstition and misery was joined, and the resulting antagonism has hardly abated even today. Alan W. Richardson
University of British Columbia Immanuel Kant was able to motivate his epistemological project by relying on the status of particular disciplines as a priori. Among these disciplines, logic was distinguished by both its age and it completion. Aristotle's logic had in all essentials completed the task of codifying the rules of judgment and inference and had provided the "canon of reason." Shortly after Kant, however, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers began seriously to rethink both the theory and the subject matter of logic. Some(Boole, Grassmann, Schroeder) wanted to convert it into a mathematical discipline investigating the algebra of thought. Others (Herbart, Bolzano)wanted to rethink the objects appropriately understood to be the subject matter of logic while yet others (Fries, Mill) sought in various ways to tie logic to an increasingly empirical study of the human mind. This talk seeks to explore the ways in which logic strayed from "the secure path of a science" (Critique of Pure Reason, Bvii) by looking to Kant's work itself as the primary locus of the destabilization of the understanding of logic that Kant himself took for granted. The paper proceeds by exploring a number of ways in which the "formal" nature of logic might be understood after Kant. Marsha L. Richmond Wayne
State University A cardinal event in the early history of genetics was the recognition circa 1904 that the behaviour of the chromosomes during the process of replication closely paralleled that expected of Mendelizing factors. Thus was founded the new subdiscipline of cytogenetics, which mutually enriched classical genetics and cytology. Yet for decades many biologists had accepted the idea that the nucleus was the seat of heredity and development. Indeed, by 1900 Richard Hertwig and his school at Munich were experimentally investigating the nature of this control. In addition to Theodor Boveri and Richard Goldschmidt, the young British zoologists Geoffrey Watkins Smith of Oxford and C. Clifford Dobell of Cambridge went to Munich to study with Hertwig. Yet while Smith accepted the nucleocentric model of the cell, Dobell subsequently became a vocal critic. This paper will assess the status of cell theory on the eve of genetics by comparing and contrasting the views of Goldschmidt, Dobell, and Smith. It explores the extent to which an individual's view of the organization of life influences their understanding of "cellular reality." Michael F. Robinson
University of Wisconsin-Madison In 1893, over two dozen Innu villagers from Labrador settled into their new home on the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They took their place among a variety of transplanted "savage" and "semi-barbarous" peoples who constituted the anthropology exhibits of the fair. Organizers set the Eskimo Village on the main Exposition grounds, apart from other ethnic villages on the Midway, and at a distance from the "White City," the fair's shrine to Anglo-Saxon progress. In so doing, they used the fairgrounds to represent a theory of cultural evolution still widespread within the anthropological community. Within this theory, the Eskimo Village symbolized human culture at its most primitive and offered white Americans a glimpse of their own prehistoric past. Recent studies have made use of the racial symbolism of the Columbian Exposition in interpreting professional and popular discourse about race in late nineteenth century America. Yet few studies have looked beyond the planning and production of the fair's exhibitions to the agency of native participants themselves. This paper examines the actions of the Innu within the Eskimo Village and their effect upon popular discourse. It argues that the Innu frequently acted in ways which undermined the "script" presented by anthropologists and organizers, and suggests revisions to the historiography of race at the Columbian Exposition. Dorothy Ross Johns Hopkins
University This paper attempts a critical overview of the development of the disciplines that are variously denominated "human, "social, and "behavioral" sciences, from their formation in the late nineteenth century to the present in Europe and the United States. I will focus on a number of key issues in that history and its historiography: the notion of social science disciplinary formation as a "project" the disputed location of the social sciences between science and the humanities the interplay of national and cross-national influences the construction of the social sciences as engineering sciences, particularly in the U.S. the postwar, international renewal of the social science disciplinary project and its threatened disintegration since 1970. Michael Ruse University
of Guelph The most influential idea in twentieth century American evolutionary biology was Sewall Wright's metaphor of an adaptive landscape. I argue that, apart from being completely confused conceptually and having absolutely no basis in empirical reality, this was a deeply non-Darwinian notion that appealed because it could be used by those (the vast majority of evolutionists) who had no mathematical ability. The metaphor's roots lie in the work of Herbert Spencer, which is no surprise for Spencer always had (and in many respects still has) far more influence on American thought than anything penned by Charles Darwin. Steven W. Ruskin University of Notre Dame John Herschel's voyage to the Cape Colony (1833-38) was an event of considerable interest for Britain. John sailed to the southern tip of Africa to observe the southern heavens. His intention was that the voyage be a "private affair...a mere party of pleasure." But his scientific renown encouraged the public imagination to place his journey in the same category as other imperial expeditions: for example, that undertaken by Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks, and those in Africa of Mungo Park and Richard Lander. Herschel, however, did not see his voyage in this way he rejected government aid and any official status. Yet the image of Herschel as an imperial scientist-explorer remained and his voyage was popularly appropriated as such. In this paper I shall discuss Herschel's Cape voyage from the private, public and imperial perspectives. The private perspective is that of Herschel I intend to discuss his efforts to ensure that the voyage and astronomical observations were free from any official obligation. The public image of the Cape voyage will be discussed to help locate the voyage in the popular discourse of imperial science and exploration. By leaving the metropolis for the periphery, in the public mind Herschel also crossed the boundary from mere scientist to the much more evocative and noble position of scientist-explorer. Finally, I will consider the voyage from the perspective of the British empire, specifically the Admiralty. I shall argue that Herschel's presence at the Cape was to be used as a stabilizing factor and form of justification for British control there. Although John quite emphatically went to the Cape colony as a private citizen of private means and private intentions, his voyage was interpreted as a project aligned with and beneficial to the expansionist ambitions of the British empire. Lisa T. Sarasohn Oregon
State University Samuel Sorbière has not fared well in the annals of the Scientific Revolution. Although Sorbière oversaw the publication of works by both Hobbes and Gassendi, and attended the Montmor Academy and visited the Royal Society, he is characterized in the seventeenth century --and now-- as someone out for the main chance. Nevertheless, I will argue that his role in the emerging scientific community needs to be recharacterized. Sorbière served a specific function in the intellectual world of his day: rather than a figure living off the ideas of others, he was a true broker of knowledge. Within the social constellations of the nascent scientific community, a broker was both audience and promoter, someone who urged the development of ideas, and then served as their apostle. While serving the interests of Hobbes, Gassendi, or others, Sorbière was recognizing their status and honoring their activities. His role as broker helped actualize their role as scientists. Sorbière's activities demonstrate that the role of amateurs of science was more complex and significant than previously recognized. Sara Schechner Harvard University Sundials were among the most ancient of astronomical instruments, and they employed mathematical projections of surprising sophistication. By showing changing shadow lengths and positions, sundials marked the passage of time, the recurring seasons, and the apparent motion of the sun in the sky. Sundials were also social tools. Since Hellenistic times, they coordinated people's meal times, and with the rise of monasticism, they also coordinated religious devotion. During the 14th to 17th centuries, as feudal society built on the rhythms of the countryside gave way to more urban, commercial society, time became a precious commodity to be budgeted and spent wisely. Merchant time was not the cyclical flow familiar to farmers, friars, and astronomers, but money slipping through the fingers. With the new time pressures came new images of Time. Classically portrayed as a winged youth holding a sundial, Time came to be seen in the Renaissance as a ruthless old man, an inescapable force causing ruin and decay. Sundials reflected these different (cyclical vs. linear) attitudes toward time. As time pressures became keenly felt by all members of society, the production of sundials increased dramatically in Europe. Many new types of pocket sundials kept busy people on schedule. Variations in the mathematical forms and designs also reveal how people spent their time and what they valued most. The strength and originality of this paper are its primary sources. It takes as its foundation over 2000 historic sundials preserved in museums worldwide. Although literary evidence is useful, it is only by the close inspection and comparison of many dials from different places and periods that one can build a picture of astronomy and mathematics in daily life, time discipline, and consumer culture. Londa Schiebinger
Pennsylvania State University The past several years have witnessed renewed interest in 17th- and 18th-century botany, the "big science" of early modern Europe. Historians have begun to analyze the importance of plants for the economic expansion of the major western European states in this period, and to explore the role of botany in European colonial expansion. This paper explores how gender relations in Europe guided naturalists as they explored other lands, peoples, and their knowledges. For over one hundred years the French, for example, sent specimens from colonial gardens in the Antilles to botanists working at the distinguish Parisian Jardin du Roi. The British furnished the elaborate Kew Gardens with dried and living specimens and exotic seeds from their extensive system of gardens stretching from Saint Vincent in the West Indies to Calcutta, Sydney, and Penang off the west coast of the Malay peninsula. How did gender mold what was included or not included in these shipments? Londa Schiebinger
Pennsylvania State University I will distribute and discuss my syllabus on gender in science and also discuss the new "Women, Gender and the History of Science Syllabus Sampler" kindly collected and prepared by Andrea Rusnock. One point I would like to raise is how to attract more men into gender in science classes. I think one answer is to teach gender issues in broader history of science classes. A second question is how to get more science students into history of science classes. Gender in science classes draws more science students than general history of science classes. Sigrid Schmalzer University
of California, San Diego "Breeding a Modern China: The Making of the Dingxian Pig, 1929-1937" explores the Mass Education Movement's efforts to transform pigs and pig breeding in Dingxian, Hebei through the importation of an American breed of pig and its hybridization with local pigs. Led by Yan Yangchu, reformers were conscious that the wholesale importation and implementation of western scientific methods had failed China in the past and would fail again. Their chief concern was that the new pig should raise production levels but still "suit local conditions." Reformers thus constructed a notion of "local conditions" to which modern science was required to conform. But "conditions" and "methods" do not play equal roles in science, and reformers did not require the "scientific" methods of pig breeding to negotiate with local methods. Despite their attention to local conditions, the reformers thus reinforced the notion that modern, western science was universal in nature, and that it could and should be applied universally, replacing local knowledge and practices. Furthermore, in discussing "local conditions," reformers found a way of talking about the people of Dingxian that fit their liberal, humanist agenda. This paper examines what kind of society the reformers presented and contrasts it with alternative ways of viewing the same "local conditions." Finally, the paper explores the relationship between the new methods of pig breeding and the process of state building: the "scientific" methods compelled farmers to participate in state-regulated breeding cooperatives and created a new arena of state control in farmers' everyday lives. Rebecca P. Schwartz, Princeton
University The increased authority of physicists as a result of their successful work on the Manhattan Project is a standard theme in the history of American physics. But how did Americans come to know about physicists' work on the atomic bomb, which after all remained entirely classified after World War II, so that the physicists could benefit thereby? An important piece of the answer is the Smyth Report, the official governmental report on the Manhattan Project, which was released days after the atomic bombs were dropped. Coming as it did into a security-imposed vacuum, the Smyth Report served as the sole resource to a nation seeking to learn about this new and fearsome weapon. In this paper, I examine how Henry DeWolf Smyth, a Princeton University physicist, crafted his report to convey to the American people a carefully controlled picture of the Manhattan Project. Using drafts of the report and Smyth's correspondence from the archives of the American Philosophical Society, I show that besides for considerations of national security, Smyth also edited his report to reflect well on the Army and British scientists, to minimize the dangers of radioactive fallout, and, most importantly, to emphasize the roles of physicists on the Manhattan Project while downplaying the vital contributions of chemists and engineers. In doing so, Smyth was guided by his own predispositions as to what constituted interesting science, and what was merely technical problem solving. Although the Smyth Report is not well remembered today, its impact is apparent in the way that so much scholarship about the Manhattan Project continues its emphasis on physicists, implicitly dismissing the others without whom success could not have been realized. This is not necessarily reflective of the reality of the Manhattan Project, but rather of how it was portrayed in this early and important work. Silvan S. Schweber Brandeis
University Teams of physical scientists -- metallurgists, physical chemists, physicists, engineers -- had often been organized at the Bell Laboratories and at the General Electric Research Laboratory to solve pressing problems in the development and improvement of particular devices. During World War II research teams in which members of sufficiently different background to cover all aspects of a given situation were assembled to address the problems of designing radar sets, nuclear piles, proximity fuses, atomic bombs, ..., of implementing operational research, and formulating answers to numerous other problems that waging a total war entails. After the war the value of such teams and the contribution of the specialists on these teams were clearly recognized, but so was the danger of overspecialization in the training of new scientists. Both at Harvard and at Princeton programs were designed to train "scientific generalists" with a command of advanced statistics who would be able to supervise, coordinate and administer such research teams. Statistics would enable the decision problems to be solved when the relevant factors were either not clear cut, or the factors involved too numerous or complex to be analyzed analytically. The computer has replaced this notion of the "scientific generalist". Over the last two decades scientific computation has reached the point where it is on par with laboratory experiments as a tool for research in physics. The computer is providing a new window through which the natural world is being observed and analyzed in exquisite detail. It has restructured the traditional roles of theorists and experimenters. It also has made for a new notion of interdisciplinarity by building new bridges between disparate subdisciplines, such as cosmology and condensed matter physics, by virtue of common models and simulations. In addition, and just as dramatically, the computer-based Internet has made it possible to communicate easily and reliably huge amounts of information throughout the world. These advances in computing and communication point to a structural transformation of the ways in which understanding is gained in the various subfields of physics. I shall illustrate this with examples from cosmology, condensed matter physics and biophysics. Marija Sesic Museum of
Science and Technology, Belgrade The paper discusses the arguments and evidence which the Serbian and Croat politicians, journalists and historians advance to determine the nationality of the electrical innovator Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Tesla is known as the author of several major patents in the field of alternating electrical current and an advisor in the construction of Niagara power plant. He lived in New York, but his work was closely followed and celebrated in the Yugoslav lands where the issue of his national identity became a matter of considerable controversy, due partly to the fact that Tesla's family, Serbian in ethnic and religious background, lived inside the borders of the Republic of Croatia (at the time of his birth, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy). In the period from the formation to the end of the 'original' Yugoslavia, Tesla's work was celebrated as intrinsically Yugoslavian. His motto 'I am proud of my Serbian origins and Croatian homeland' was often cited in support national toleration, despite the fact that no such claim was ever found in his writings. His portraits appeared on banknotes, in fictional authobiographies, in the names of scientific institutions, and theater performances. This paper will focus on some of the most extraordinary uses of his scientific work and public image and, particularly, on the ways in which his Yugoslavian identity disappeared after the fall of Yugoslavia in 1991. Jonathan Sheehan Indiana
University What do philology, archaeology, mnemonics, jurisprudence, oratory, optics, rhetoric, grammar, ethics, pneumatics, theology and economics all have in common? All-in the mind of Johann Alsted, a seventeenth-century German polymath-could be comprehended in the vast encyclopedia of the Bible. That the Bible was written word of God is only a partial explanation for Alsted's position. Unlike previous eras, the seventeenth century gave the motto "there is no book but Sacred Scripture" a literal twist: the Bible enveloped all literature, for Baroque scholars, by virtue of the arrangement and disposition of knowledge inside it. Its pages not only included all the human and natural sciences, but also organized them and gave them recognizable form. Alsted's dream of an encyclopedic Bible was concretized in various forms over the course of the century, from Samuel Bochart's Hierozoicon, which provided detailed philological and historical investigations of Scriptural animals, to nearly innumerable Scriptural geographies. Read structurally, such works brought an a priori (usually Ramist or neo-Ramist) organization to the universe of Biblical knowledge. Only in the early eighteenth century did the Bible itself become an organizational principle, not just for Biblical knowledge but for knowledge in general. Like the alphabet, the Bible was-in such works as the massive Berleburger Bible (1726-1740) and the so-called Copper Bible, the Physica sacra of 1731-an arbitrary system for coordinating and encompassing knowledge of both theology as well as human and natural history. If Alsted and other seventeenth-century polymaths placed the Biblical encyclopedia within a deductive and logically systematic structure of human and divine knowledge, by the eighteenth-century, the Bible-its complicated and contradictory histories-itself became the structure. This paper will examine the origins and consequences of this transformation, focusing principally on the Physica sacra. This four volume monument-comprising some 800 folio engravings of the natural history of the Bible, paralleled by two translations and extensive scholarly and scientific commentary-shows at its clearest the promise and perils of a Biblical encyclopedia. On the one hand, the Physica sacra provided its readers with a compilation and synthesis of a field of knowledge whose perimeters had expanded alarmingly in the last century. Its formal properties in this view gave it a structural and editorial flexibility in the face of unprecedented acceleration of human knowledge. From philology to fossils, the Physica sacra promised to cover it all. On the other hand, however, the very form of such a project had profound implications for the status of Bible as the premier text in the Western canon. After all, if the Bible was as arbitrary an organizational principle as the alphabet, how could one say, in good faith, "there is no book but Sacred Scripture"? Although, as I will argue, the Biblical encyclopedia could not survive the paradoxes of its form, the efforts made to produce such texts testify to a profound uncertainty in Early Modern Europe about the horizons of human knowledge, and a profound sense that such knowledge must--for it truly to remain human knowledge--be contained within human, and humanistic, structures. Grace Y. Shen Harvard University This paper will discuss the role of place in mediating the investigation and understanding of the 1926 Peking Man discoveries at Chou-k'ou-tien (Zhoukoudian), China. It is centrally concerned with different aspects of transit between the local and global, particularly how these movements were tethered by both the physical and material circumstances of the cave and the cave's figurative implications. Four conceptions of "place" will be examined to show the suppleness of this concept in action and the versatility of its analytic possibilities. The first example charts the ways in which theoretical concerns, especially the idea of centers of primate dispersal, focused attention on China/Central Asia in the search for early hominids. The second contrasts the "success" of the Peking Man discovery with the "failure" of Eugene Dubois' Java Man find on the basis of consciously developed local institutional structures, such as the Peking Union Medical College Cenozoic Research Laboratory, the Peking University Geology department, and the Geological Survey of China. Third and fourth are two aspects of Chinese national identity which hinged on invocations of place to first embrace the Peking Man find and then to use it as currency in widening international arenas (political and scientific). In one case, Peking Man's habitat is the basis for its enrollment into narratives of Chinese cultural history, and in the other, the possession of the literal remains of Peking Man (actually over 45 specimens) plays into constructions of China as a modern nation-state. Though the meanings of "place," "local," and "global" lay on shifting sand in these varied contexts, the cave functions as a solid space within which interrelations can be negotiated. Brian C. Shipley Dalhousie
University The question of the origin of coal deposits, contemporary commentators agreed, was one of the most provocative geological issues of the mid-nineteenth century. Although it had already been established that coal was of vegetable rather than mineral derivation, widespread uncertainty persisted as to how this vegetative material had been accumulated into the deposits that eventually became coal. While it was once generally assumed that massive floods had been responsible for sweeping trees and plants from the land, and depositing this material in lakes and estuaries, new evidence in the 1830s led some observers to argue the alternative, that the plants which became coal had actually grown in the same places where the deposits subsequently formed. Strangely, this debate has not attracted attention from historians commensurate with that which it received from geologists. This is probably partly due to the perception that studies of coal arose primarily from economic rather than scientific motives. However, I aim to show that the development of theories about the origin of coal was intrinsically connected to changes in the understanding of geological processes such as elevation and subsidence, as well as to the new appreciation of the magnitude of geological time. In this paper, I focus on contribution made to the coal debate by William Logan in 1840 (two years before he became the first director of the Geological Survey of Canada). Although his role may have seemed small at the time, he was later to receive most of the credit for establishing the in situ theory of coal formation. In addition to reconstructing part of this neglected historical episode, then, I am also concerned to analyze the ways in which Logan and his supporters made use of the recent past to establish their preferred version of events, and their motives for doing so. Their stories, told at the expense of other participants in the debate, have proved to be highly durable, persisting almost unchanged to the present. Sujit P. Sivasundaram
Christ's College, University of Cambridge When the London Missionary Society was formed in 1795, it was decided that the first missionaries should be sent to the South Pacific. These missionaries, and those who followed them, wrote an enormous number of letters and reports, and sent back many 'curious' artefacts. Shells, idols, botanical specimens, spears and Pacific islanders were amongst the trophies sent home. Their supporters and friends returned the compliment by shipping back livestock, steel and printing presses, for example. A missionary museum was set up in London where the relics of 'savagery' could be displayed. Similarly, objects from Britain took pride of place in the houses of certain South Pacific people, who were favoured by the missionaries. This paper will consider the politics of exchange and how integral this was to the representation of a distant place. How did these objects denote that the mission was succeeding? How did mission supporters encourage their agents by sending objects to them? Was there a relationship between the shells and the idols that were sent home or the steel and the livestock that was sent to the South Pacific? Indeed, scientific practices were demonstrated in relation to objects that would not normally be considered under that title. Pacific islanders, who arrived in Britain, for example, were often treated as natural historical specimens. They were on occasion put in cages, portrayed without clothes, and spoken of as wild animals. How did missionaries' museology fit into their theology? Their emphasis on the objects of this world, would seem surprising given that they were ushering in the world to come. Charlotte L. Sleigh University
of Kent at Canterbury 'Brave New World presents a ... picture of society, in which the attempt to re-create human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the limits of the possible.' Thus Aldous Huxley described his celebrated novel of 1932. The 'picture of society' in question was by no means unique to Huxley his own brother Julian had published a popularizing digest of myrmecological scholarship just two years earlier. The foremost ant scholar at the time of the Huxleys' books was an American, William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937). Wheeler synthesized a top-down model of social explanation - borrowed by the Huxleys - for the behavior of the ant-colony. Investigation reveals that Wheeler worked to create his science within a European tradition of group-based ant/human analogy that may be traced to Espinas and Durkheim from the mid 1920s, Wheeler was specifically inspired by the elitist Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. As a thorough-going sociological approach was introduced into myrmecology, it obscured the significance of the individual ant and, by implication, man. Writers of both entomological and creative literature hastened to exempt themselves from this, their own generalization. In the modernist context, the ant-mass was constructed as the discomfiting mass of civilized society. Phillip R. Sloan University
of Notre Dame Historians of science have often commented upon the importance of German influences for understanding the early nineteenth century scientific developments in Britain exemplified by Faraday, Whewell, Davy, Lyell, Babbage, Owen, Barry, and even Darwin. However, little detail is available on how German thought was embodied institutionally and concretely transmitted to an Anglophone audience. Although there had been broad contacts in the late eighteenth century, the Napoleonic imposition of the Continental Blockade in 1806 had significantly restricted the interchanges between Continental and British scientists and physicians. This was also represented by a decline in periodical reports on German science. With the end of the Napoleonic wars, a new era of contact was initiated between workers in the Germanies and those in Britain. Travels to the Continent, renewal of study by British students at German universities, and the reciprocal return of German intellectuals and scientists to the British Isles commenced. One institution, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, home of the great Hunterian anatomical Museum and a prestigious lecture series in Comparative Anatomy, played a central role in the formal transmission of German life science into London in the 1815-1840 period. Its renowned anatomical museum drew a wave of foreign visitors, including leading German scientific figures, to London after the Napoleonic era who made personal contacts with individuals associated with the College. Particularly through the lectures of Coleridge's disciple, Joseph Henry Green, the Hunterian Lecturer in Comparative Anatomy from 1824-29, the College also became a primary vehicle by which the theories and content of German life science and philosophy were transmitted to a London audience. This presentation will focus on two main issues: 1) the renewal of German-English scientific contacts after 1814 2) the role of the College of Surgeons in the dissemination of German philosophy and biology into London in the 1815-40 period. E. Elena Songster University
of California, San Diego "Forest Stands for Pandas: Scientific Forestry and Nature Reserves in Sichuan, China" examines the creation of nature reserves in Southwestern province of Sichuan in the People‚s Republic of China. Most of Sichuan‚s nature reserves constitute (what I call) the "panda belt" of Sichuan. These panda-protecting nature reserves exist in a band of counties that runs through the mountains on the Western rim of the Sichuan basin from the center of the province to its northern edge. Most of the reserves were created following the ideological and political shifts that occurred in Chinese Communist Party as it attempted to better integrate China in the international arena in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. For the first time, the 1976 constitution explicitly incorporated environmental protection as a governmental goal and duty. These reserves offered the Chinese government a means of engaging with the international community through the medium of science. In part due to the attention that such unique species as the panda and the golden monkey attracted from both local and international scientific communities, these hinterland areas were transformed into state-protected scientific research reserves. In Sichuan these reserves thus became an important part of the province's rising image as a modern science center for China. The specialized designation of "nature reserves" attempted to alter the way that the Sichuanese used and perceived the nature and environment of their native province. Government regulation commanded the Sichuanese to become stewards of the disappearing identity through these natural (and now national) treasures that reached back to prehuman existence by employing and supporting cutting-edge scientific advancement. Sichuan‚s nature reserves thus created perfect reflections of modern national(istic) space through this obscured sense of time. Through the nature reserves, science influenced national consciousness, state policy, and drew a link between notions and present and ancient Chinese heritage through the natural geography. Richard J. Sorrenson
Indiana University Within less than a decade in the middle of the twentieth century, ambitious nations demonstrated their Cold War vigor by hand picking men to do dangerous things that had not been done before, had no direct economic utility, but were strangely compelling: climbing Mt. Everest, crossing Antarctica, and orbiting the earth. Only the two postwar superpowers (the USSR and the USA) could afford the latter, but Britain, much reduced in influence and wealth after the brutal struggle of World War Two, set out to demonstrate that it too still had the scientific, technical, and human capacity to be taken seriously on the world stage. To succeed, I shall argue, Britain chose a novel and explicitly post-imperial mode, constructed around the British Commonwealth, to mount complicated, meticulously planned, multinational expeditions to Everest and the Antarctic. In the attempt on Everest, the expedition leader, former army officer John Hunt, considered climbers from Britain, Kenya, Canada, New Zealand, India, and Nepal, while explicitly rejecting those from Europe or the United States. In London, he chose an experienced New Zealand climber, Edmund Hillary, and when in Nepal, he chose the locally eminent Sherpa Tenzing Norgay to join the party. The expedition, after much effort, placed three pairs of men at the South Col of the mountain after the first pair failed in their final assault, Hunt ordered Hillary and Tenzing to try. Upon their successful final ascent, these two members of the British Commonwealth stood at the top of a supply pyramid that had been constructed in London and flung across Asia. Neither Hillary nor Hunt had expected the worldwide adulation that was to follow both constantly emphasized the importance of the entire team. None the less, Hillary used his fame and the geographical proximity of his nation to the South Pole to take a more central role in the trans-Antarctic expedition of 1957 and 1958 which was organized by the British geologist Vivian Fuchs as one of the British Commonwealth's contributions to the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Careful planning, appropriate mechanization, and contributions of funds, personnel, and expertise from Australia, South Africa and New Zealand led to a successful crossing of the continent. Compared to the Soviet or US explorations of space, the Everest and Antarctic expeditions were on a very much smaller scale. Forced by reduced circumstances to operate more modestly, they still managed to complete their missions successfully and to generate worldwide acclaim. Britain, by operating in a new post-imperial mode that relied upon cooperation between like-minded nations, was able to demonstrate that it too had the right stuff in some very cold and hostile places. Susan B. Spath Independent
Scholar The cell theory introduced in the middle of the 19th century provided a fundamental conceptual lens for perceiving and studying living things. This paper argues that procaryote/eucaryote distinction introduced by microbiologists R.Y. Stanier and C.B. van Niel in 1962 represents a reformation of the cell theory made necessary and possible by and for the new biologies of the post World War II era. Disciplinary politics, new knowledge about the biology of bacteria, and new laboratory practices interacted in encouraging this reformulation. Stanier and van Niel introduced these categories to solve a conceptual problem central to their ambitions to make microbiology into a coherent and rigorous science. From the 1940's on, they sought to define bacteria as biological entities and to specify their place in the natural order. By 1961, defining bacteria in biological terms had acquired a new urgency. A widening group of researchers were using bacteria to investigate fundamental biological problems, including protein synthesis, the replication of DNA, and the nature of the genetic code. For practitioners interested primarily in molecules, legitimizing bacteria as biological organisms legitimized their tool of investigation. In 1962, Stanier and van Niel proposed the terms procaryote and eucaryote to refer to two fundamentally distinct cell types, based on the details of their plan of organization. Conceiving of bacteria as procaryotes gave these once marginalized organisms a clear and important position in the order of nature. The procaryote/eucaryote distinction ended the conventional belief that plants and animals represented the fundamental bifurcation among living things. The new term also signified the dual nature of the bacterium as organism and as technology. From the 1960's through the 1980's, the procaryote/eucaryote distinction served as the generally accepted version of the cell theory. Matthew Stanley Harvard
University Arthur Eddington, the British astronomer best known for his stellar models and the 1919 eclipse expedition to confirm general relativity, developed a philosophy of science closely related to his Quaker faith. This faith stressed the rejection of a need for dogmatic certainty in favor of a spirit of continual seeking for spiritual truth. His religious beliefs provided conceptual resources for constructing a view of science as an open-ended enterprise in which theories were not valued for their certainty or finality, but rather by their ability to allow further scientific investigation. This paper argues that this philosophy was fundamental for the creation and use of Eddington's models of stellar structure. John Stenhouse University
of Otago Historians of science have only recently begun investigating the relationship between the modern Protestant missionary movement and modern Western science. This paper argues that missionaries played a modest role in the production of modern Western scientific knowledge, particularly in natural history, ethnography, and the biomedical sciences, and a more significant one in helping disseminate Western science to the world, particularly during the heyday of missionary science between about 1870 and 1930. Complexity and ambivalence characterized each aspect of the triangular relationship between Protestant missionaries, Western science, and their host cultures. The missionary movement, while containing those eager to cultivate sciences such as geography and medicine to facilitate evangelism, also contained pietists who warned more scientifically-oriented colleagues against anything except direct evangelism. Missionary suspicion of 'godless' Western science burgeoned in the post-Darwinian era, as apostles of T.H. Huxley spread the gospel of scientific naturalism. Ambivalence also characterized host cultures' reception of missionary science. Many simply ignored or rejected the missionaries and all their works. Yet even in the toughest mission fields such as China and India, modernizing élites intent on strengthening their nation embraced missionary science, and plenty of ordinary people found healing in missionary medicine. Despite the ambivalence they encountered from missionary colleagues and many of their hosts, Protestant missionaries played a significant role in the globalization of Western science. James E. Strick Arizona
State University The concept of endosymbiosis as the origin of eukaryot-ic cells and/or their organelles began around 1905 with theories of the Russian biologist Mereschovsky. As Sapp, Khakhina and others have shown, numerous additional contrib-utors, e.g. Paul Portier and Ivan Wallin, added observa-tions to support this theory throughout the twentieth centu-ry. The concept ill fit existing cell theory, however, until the establishment of the prokaryote/ eukaryote dis-tinction in the 1960s and the work of Lynn Margulis begin-ning in 1967. This paper will bring up to date the status of endosymbiosis theory since Sapp's 1994 account, focusing on the claims that are still not widely accepted such as the spirochete origin of eukaryotic "flagella" ("undulipo-dia" of the Margulis school), origin of centrioles and mitotic spindle apparatus, and origin of the eukaryotic nucleus from fusion of multiple eubacterial and archaeal DNA units. More importantly, I will show how integral endo-symbiosis theory has become to the entire new discipline of exobiology and how cell theory has changed in fundamental ways since the 1960s, under the influence of exobiology generally and cell symbiosis theory in particular. Alice Stroup The two principal scientific societies of the late 17th century counted alchemists among their number. With historians now acknowledging Robert Boyle's marriage of corpuscularian and alchemical traditions, it is important to examine the vitalist corpuscularianism of Samuel Cottereau Duclos (d. 1685), the alchemist of the AcadÈmie royale des sciences. Although in 1668 Duclos analyzed Boyle's Certain Physiological Essays for his Paris colleagues, his remarks (surviving in three manuscripts in Paris) remain neglected by historians, who have mistakenly assumed that they concern Boyle's Sceptical Chymist. Yet Duclos's remarks are crucial to understanding the theoretical contexts within which savants, individually and collectively, carried out their researches. Hence the Academy's cryptic verdict, published in its earliest histories, that Boyle was more the philosophical, Duclos the more chemical, savant. Duclos's critique clarifies the polemical usage of "alchimie," "alchimiste," "hermÈtique," "platonisme," and "chimie" during a period when the fledgling AcadÈmie was protecting what we might label "scientific Gallicanism," that is, the right of savants in France to inquire freely into natural philosophy. Moreover, by criticizing the metaphysical engine driving Boyle's interpretations of experimental data, Duclos distinguishes his own corpuscularianism from that of Boyle. As a hitherto unknown link between the London and Paris scientific societies, Duclos's critique of Boyle helps us set the record straight by comparing these two (al)chemists, and (in the process) reconsidering English and French science in the 1660s. Abha Sur Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Meghnad Saha (1893-1957) was one of India's foremost physicists. Saha's ionization theory of gases had a profound impact on astrophysics as it changed astronomical spectroscopy from a qualitative tool for classification of stars to a precise technique of quantitative measurements. Its simple integration of atomic physics with thermodynamics established the fundamental link between microscopic and macroscopic phenomena. Stewart A. Mitchell credited the ionization theory for illustrating the essential unity of astronomy where spectra of gigantic stars could provide information about the size of a tiny atom and where a deeper understanding of the physics of the evolution of stars or the structure of the universe necessarily involved "an intimate study of the ultimate constitution of matter." In this paper I juxtapose Saha's scientific writings with his commentaries on civic society to draw out the philosophical essence of his science. I suggest that while hierarchical caste distinctions of the Indian society as well as pervasive "orientalism" of the West mediated Saha's social interactions with other scientists, his opposition to caste ideologies and his egalitarianism found a strong expression in his science. John P. Swann U. S. Food
and Drug Administration The pursuit of science and research at FDA developed as a function of the agency's core mission to protect consumer health, an endeavor certainly shaped by many developments beyond the agency's direct control. Thus, among the factors that have influenced the development of science in the FDA in the past one hundred years are legal mandates, requirements of public health disasters, changing philosophies of regulation in the executive branch, the demands of a beguiling and sophisticated marketplace, and the unique interests of regulated entities. The assorted internal reorganizations wrought by these external stimuli have in turn had an impact on the practice of science. The scientific requirements of the agency's mission also necessitated collaborative work with outside individuals and institutions, such as the development of methods of analysis under the auspices of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists. Taking into account some of these influences, this paper will discuss the development of science and research as a recognized function of the FDA's field offices and headquarters, where different regulatory responsibilities affected the way science and research evolved. Case studies that focus on specific laboratories, offices, and regulatory events from different eras will be used to illustrate the process and extent to which science became institutionalized in FDA.
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