Pnina  Abir-Am

Brandeis University ( pnina.abiram@verizon.net )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Gender and Cultural Memory: Remembering Dorothy Hodgkin in the First, Second, and Third Worlds.

The paper explores the interaction between gender, political ideology, and cultural memory in the case of Dorothy Hodgkin, 1910-1994, a Nobel Laureate and Pugwash President. Memories of Hodgkin are retrieved from commemorative events, such as her 70th and 80th anniversaries, the 50th anniversary of the first protein X-ray photo that she co-authored, and obituaries. The paper compares memories generated by Hodgkin in her native England with those in China and India. On the one hand, The paper aims to explain why memories generated by Hodgkin differ across worlds bound by specific political ideologies. On the other hand, the paper aims to explain why such memories also differ across the gender of the remember, with women scientists being the only ones who recall Hodgkin first and foremost as a scientist; hence, they alone are able to provide detailed assessments of her scientific accomplishments. The paper concludes with a discussion of visual representations of Hodgkin, ranging from casual photos to portraits from the National Gallery, as signifiers of the tension surrounding the changing role of women in science.

Amy  Ackerberg-Hastings

University of Maryland University College ( aackerbe@erols.com )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Fashionable Friends, Continental Comparisons, and Schehallien: The Life of John Playfair through His Letters

The talk reports on an effort to locate and transcribe all the correspondence related to John Playfair (1748-1819). Best known for popularizing James Hutton's geological theories, Playfair served as joint professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University from 1785 to 1805 and then succeeded John Robison as chair of natural philosophy. Nearly one hundred letters span most of Playfair's career, from 1772 to 1819. There are two especially substantive runs in the collection. The first documents Playfair's life as a parish minister in the 1770s, evaluating books and ambitions with friend and patron, William Robertson. The second outlines Playfair's geological tour of France, Switzerland, and Italy in 1816 and 1817. The collection also augments several themes of Playfair's overall biography. He discussed his own publications with Archibald Constable and Macvey Napier, most notably Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), articles in Edinburgh Review (1804 and following), Outlines of Natural Philosophy (1814), and "Dissertation on the Progress of Mathematical and Physical Science Since the Revival of Letters in Europe" (1816). Playfair engaged in prominent relationship networks at the turn of the nineteenth century, corresponding with Mary Berry, John Rennie, John Leslie, Francis Horner, and Robert Stevenson about acquaintances such as Lord Webb Seymour, Humphry and Jane Davy, Horace Walpole, Anne Damer, and Patrick Brydone. Playfair advocated whiggish politics in Great Britain and on the Continent, and he commented on literary culture in Edinburgh and London. Finally, he observed and participated in science during the transitional period from natural philosophy to separate disciplines.

Lloyd  Ackert

Yale University ( lloydackert@sbcglobal.net )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Organic Matter and the Rise of Holistic Agriculture: John Pitkin Norton and William Henry Brewer at Yale, 1840-1900

In the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural chemists studying at Yale strove to reform agriculture in New England.  At the center of their efforts lay the new principles of organic chemistry that they had imbibed from their training abroad with Justus Liebig in Germany, James Johnston in Scotland, and Jean Baptiste Dumas in France.  This training taught the American students--already prepared by the Sillimans--to see and investigate nature as a circulation of matter through the soil, plants, and animals and back again into the soil.  John Pitkin Norton (1822-1852) and William Henry Brewer (1828-1910) engaged this holistic vision of the "cycle of life" in their attempts to reform agriculture through science, e.g. by promoting the use of organic matter as "green fertilizers."  Revisiting this history, first explored by Margaret Rossiter in The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus Liebig and the Americans, 1840-1880 (1975), allows us to examine the rise of a thermodynamic view in biology—by Dumas and Leibig in Europe and its subsequent transmission to the United States.  The experiences of Norton and Brewer provide case studies for comparing the transfer of this view across scientific cultures (German, French, British, and America) and across disciplines (Organic Chemistry, Agriculture, Forestry, and Biology).

Juliana   Adelman

National University of Ireland, Galway ( juliana.adelman@nuigalway.ie )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Seeing is Believing?: John W. Dawson, William B. Carpenter, the ‘Galway Professors’ and the Eozoön Controversy_

In 1864 Canadian geologists John Dawson and William Logan announced the discovery of Eozoön Canadense, believed to be the oldest known fossil, to the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Bath.  The proof of its status as a fossil was to be seen under the microscope.  Embraced by members of the Geological Society of London and confirmed by the eminent microscopist W. B. Carpenter, the organic origin of ‘the dawn animal of Canada’ was questioned only by two professors in the west of Ireland.  Although disadvantaged by their isolation, William King and Thomas Rowney waged war on the ‘eozoönists’ for nearly twenty years.  This paper will argue that the ubiquity of the microscope as a tool for amateurs and hobbyists, supported by Carpenter’s own books, prevented any one person from claiming authority over its use.  The ambiguous and individual nature of what one viewed under the microscope led the eozoönists to try to win support through the supervised viewing of specimens, gifts of prepared slides, copious illustrations and instructions in scientific journals to potential viewers.  King and Rowney, by contrast, argued that those who saw eozoön as a fossil were seeing through eyes clouded with prejudice.  Their own illustrations of eozoön varied dramatically from those of Carpenter and Dawson.  The debate over eozoön thus becomes a good example of how men of science attempted to make the microscope an infallible component of scientific apparatus.

Atsushi Akera

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Atmosphere, Ritual and Order: Terminating the Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study

There is a growing awareness that cold war research did not constitute a radical disjuncture in US research traditions, but that it emerged out of the integration of institutional practices and disciplinary traditions forged during an earlier era. While this subtle rereading of A. Hunter Dupree's thesis describing a 'great insaturation' (1940) has been achieved through a closer examination of wartime research organizations, there is still relatively little in the way of institutional-level studies that document the postwar transition of US research organizations._ In this paper, I describe the postwar transitions at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), as seen through their struggles with mathematician John von Neumann's Electronic Computer Project (ECP). The IAS, along with Harvard, was one of the few academic organizations that refused to embrace the new era of federally sponsored research. Yet, although the IAS' decision to terminate von Neumann's project is seen as the inevitable outcome of a mismatch between an engineering endeavor and the IAS' self-image as a bastion of fundamental knowledge, there was more to the contemporary dispute. During 1945, there was open disagreement about whether the IAS should develop a program in experimental physics. Opinions varied from those of Oswald Veblen and von Neumann, who favored the development, to those of an aging Einstein, who denigrated experimental physics as a form of 'engineering' endeavor._The ECP was tolerated. While some faculty members resisted new institutional policies that would embrace the experimental sciences, neither were they willing to challenge a colleague's right to choose their research topic. At the same time, I show how the engineering practices within the ECP were themselves shaped by their institutional context. For instance, the ECP's chief engineer, Julian Bigelow, saw his work as a 'Program of Experimentation,' and drew more from an established tradition for building scientific instruments instead of other available traditions in electronics engineering. This produced internal tensions within the project that damaged the group's credibility._ I draw on ethnomethodological principles to pay close attention to the process by which various differences and tensions became articulated during the course of the ECP. In fact, seemingly trivial things did as much to harden attitudes within the IAS faculty. Early questions arose over whether the project could have a permanent staff, when permanent appointments were reserved for a very select group of faculty. Meanwhile, the failure of the ECP staff members to observe proper decorum during the IAS' afternoon 'teas' brought the IAS director to ask whether the 'computer people' were having a detrimental effect on the atmosphere of the institute. In the end, the faculty would draw on their own well tested academic traditions-that of seeking external review letters in academic tenure decisions-in placing the ECP itself under trial._ The IAS stands at the opposite end of the spectrum when set against MIT and Stanford-the two institutions examined by Stuart Leslie in Cold War and American Science (1993). By focusing on the tension as opposed to the harmony within the military-industrial-academic complex this paper hopes to point to the greater diversity and pluralism to be found in an era of cold war research.

Nancy  Anderson

Université de Genève ( nancy.anderson@medecine.unige.ch )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Divided Expertise: Biologists, a Physicist, and the Beginnings of Video Microscopy

In many important types of observations in biological research, the information provided by the specimens is in the form of photons-quanta..._ George T. Reynolds, (1972) “Image Intensification Applied to Biological Problems.” Quarterly Review of Biophysics.__In 1962, after presenting a speech to the Sigma Xi Society on the successful use of image intensifiers in his particle physics work, George Reynolds (Princeton University) was approached by two life scientists, Robert Allen and Shinya Inoué, who wanted to know how electronic technologies might assist cell biologists. They would end up inviting Reynolds to Woods Hole to begin collaborations, and by the early 1970s he was a regular Woods Hole summer resident. This paper will discuss collaborations between Reynolds and biologists in the early development of the important field of video microscopy.  ---Allen and (especially) Inoué would  maintain long-term professional relationships with Reynolds, and both biologists would make immensely creative contributions to the development of video microscopy, as will be noted in this talk---  As for Reynolds, in the 1960s and 1970s, he published extensively on the potential uses and advantages of electronics in biology, especially in the work fluorescence light microscopy and in the use of radioactive tracers.  In this paper I will look at Reynolds' work with biologists and how they divided the task of expert witnessing, that is, of establishing the credibility of the electronic image of biological material, between the biologist as expert on life processes and the physicist as electronics/optics expert.  This paper will offer a view of the role of physicists in the development of the biological sciences during the second half of the 20th century.

Karl  Appuhn

New York University ( appuhn@nyu.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

A Show for the Eyes that Serves No Purpose: Lagoon Management Debates in Early Modern Venice

Despite a long history of large-scale water management projects, the Venetian Republic represented something of an oddity in the wider European context by the late seventeenth century. While elsewhere in Europe reclamation was one of the principal goals of both public and private water management schemes, the Venetians were unmoved by promise of increased profit and agrarian productivity. Instead, the Venetians held fast to the idea that the lagoon was a unique environment that required a unique form of stewardship on the part of its human inhabitants. Even as Dutch techniques began to spread across Europe, the Venetians continued to rely on homegrown technologies that had been developed by local experts informed by an oral and highly empirical tradition. In 1691, however, the knowledge of the local experts was put to the test by a Venetian expatriate named Matteo Alberti who had studied architecture and engineering techniques in Paris and the Low Countries. Alberti built a Dutch breakwater on one of the barrier islands of the lagoon in an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of northern technology. This paper will examine the results of the trial as well as the public debate between Alberti and the Republic’s water expert, a man named Carlo Guberni in an attempt to shed light on Venetian attitudes towards nature and technologies of environmental control.

Eric H. Ash

Wayne State University ( ericash@wayne.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Making a Fruitful Soil: Expertise and Water Management in the English Fens

The drainage of the English Fenlands was one of the largest and most expensive engineering projects undertaken in England during the seventeenth century. Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch émigré, was the individual responsible for designing and overseeing the vast drainage works, yet his plans sparked considerable controversy. In 1641, Vermuyden was attacked in print by a number of English authors, who believed that his application of Dutch drainage techniques to the English Fens was inappropriate and certain to fail. The dispute became a very public war of words, fought through a series of printed treatises in which each author promoted his own plan for the drainage, and condemned the plans of everyone else. Given the enormous sums invested in the project, and the potential profits to be made from the speculation in newly drained farmland, the stakes of the debate were very high. Yet because no drainage projects of such a large scale had been attempted in England since the Roman occupation, the investors’ analysis of the dispute could not be based primarily on prior experience or proven results, but was shaped instead by the perceived expertise and credibility of the individuals involved. Throughout the controversy, Vermuyden enjoyed a considerable advantage, if only because no Englishman could match his claims to expertise in (Dutch) land reclamation strategies.

Renzo  Baldasso

Columbia University ( rb843@columbia.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - I

The Intellectual Cultures of Ratdolt's Figures

For the figures of the editio princeps of Euclid's Elements (Venice, 1482), Erhard Ratdolt, printer and savant, prepared almost five hundred metal-cuts.   As confirmed by his dedicatory letter, behind this herculean effort stood strong convictions about the importance of visual representation and visual thinking in the mathematical disciplines.   In fact, Ratdolt's figures epitomize the beliefs of a group of scientifically minded humanists active in Venice in the later fifteenth century.  In the course of editing and preparing classical texts for publication, they uncovered the visual dimension of ancient science and began a sustained effort to provide new figures for ancient scientific works, recreating the diagrams and illustrations that medieval scribes had failed to transmit.   By identifying and analyzing the intellectual and cultural forces that shaped the making of Ratdolt's figures, this paper hopes to establish the crucial contribution of Venetian humanists to the integration of visual representation in the practice of early modern science.

Daniela S. Barberis

The University of Chicago ( d-barberis@uchicago.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

Visiting the “Prussian Schoolmaster”: French Philosophers on Study Missions to Germany

By the second half of the nineteenth century, French intellectuals found themselves admiring German models of scientific and humanistic education. Traveling to Germany became a rite of passage for young agrégés who aimed to pursue a career in teaching and research.  The French Minister of Education, Victor Duruy, seeking to reform the French system, sent a promising young philosopher, Émile Boutroux, on a mission to Germany, with the aim of producing a report on the state of higher education as early as 1868. After the Franco-Prussian war, this study mission to Germany became institutionalized, with the best philosophy agrégés regularly receiving scholarships to study various aspects of the German academic system. Théodule Ribot, Alfred Espinas, Alfred Fouillée, Émile Durkheim, Lucien Herr, Élie Halévy, and Célestin Bouglé are among the best-known young philosophers to travel through Germany on such scholarships. This paper aims to examine the impact that these study trips to Germany had upon the philosophical practices and epistemological positions of these two generations of French philosophers (1870s, 1890s). I will argue that their trips to Germany led them to develop notions of specific national philosophical traditions and philosophical temperaments. The effects of their German experience further led them to advocate and implement changes both in the institutional organization of philosophy and in their personal work practices.

Nathaniel  Barrett

Boston University ( frostbarrett@yahoo.com )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

Natural or Supernatural?  A Historiographic Study of Spiritualism and Psychical Research

In the nineteenth century, a popular spiritualist movement in America posed a challenge to the emerging scientific establishment.  Spiritualists claimed that scientific principles of empirical evidence called for science to abandon its narrow metaphysical prejudice of materialism and open its eyes to paranormal phenomena of the mind and/or soul.  In response, psychical research societies formed in Britain and America, attracting the support of notable figures like Henry Sidgwick and William James.  However, after a flurry of activity that lasted into the early twentieth century, psychical research lost momentum and credibility, and has since worn the dubious label of “pseudo-science.”  This paper examines historical treatments of spiritualism and psychical research in their heyday (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), with special attention to the possibility that historians have allowed the fate of the spiritualist challenge to obscure its historical significance.  Spiritualists and psychical researchers were deliberate in their use of the categories of “natural” and “supernatural”: they vehemently opposed supernaturalism, and claimed scientific legitimacy for the paranormal as natural phenomena.  Yet, perhaps biased by the failure of the psychical research program, historical accounts tend to apply the label of “supernatural” to the ideas of spiritualists without careful consideration of their complex though perhaps confused stance.  Even if spiritualists misjudged categories of the natural and supernatural, their challenge may have as-yet unrecognized significance for the formation of psychology and other mind/brain sciences.  Proper recognition requires the self-conscious appraisal of these categories by philosophers and historians of science.

Richard  Bellon

Michigan State University ( bellonr@msu.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - I

Charles Darwin Outflanks His Enemies

Evolution was scientific heterodoxy when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.  By the time he published the sixth edition in 1872, he could claim with full justification that "at the present day almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form."  In this talk, I will argue that the Origin by itself did not cause the remarkable transformation in scientific thought, nor could it have.  This "considerable revolution in natural history" took place only after Darwin and his allies tied the theory of the Origin to the practice of original research.  Darwin accomplished this with his evolutionary botany, embodied in his ponderously titled 1862 book, On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effect of Intercrossing.  This work demonstrated, in a way that the Origin could not, that evolution would enhance rather than undermine the existing practices of technical natural history. This demonstration was crucial in converting skeptics and recruiting young naturalists who were more interested in finding a research project to follow than a creed to believe.  Darwin himself viewed Orchids as "a 'flank movement' on the enemy."  A complete and comprehensive understanding of the Darwinian Revolution requires us to place Orchids alongside the Origin at the center of our analysis.

Keith R Benson

Green College, University of British Columbia ( krbenson@interchange.ubc.ca )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

The Pacific Coast, the Intertidal Zone, and a Place for Biology

At the present time, there is considerable interest in the physical setting for science, that is, its actual “place.”  Among historians of biology, place has been considered to be a crucial component to the study of ecology.  Other historians have noted the “built” environments (laboratories) for the study of biology along the seashore, even referring to these places in terms more reminiscent to vacation sites.  In this paper, I examine the “place” of intertidal ecology investigations, both in terms of the physical space and the built space.  Part of the examination will investigate the aesthetic aspect of the Pacific Coast, part will evaluate the unique character of the intertidal zone, and part will consider the construction of “natural” laboratories and “built” laboratories as characteristic places for biology.

Avner  Ben-Zaken

Harvard Society of Fellows ( benzaken@fas.harvard.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

No Utopia is an Island

In 1671, Edward Pocock Jr. published in London a bilingual edition of Ibn-Tufayl's Hayy Ben-Yaqzhn. The philosophical treatise tells a story about Hayy, a little boy, growing up alone on a deserted island. Through experimenting nature he was able to establish foundations for natural philosophy. The piece of IbnhTufayl, a Spanish-Arab philosopher, was originally written in the 12th century in Fez and was heavily circulated in medieval Islamic intellectual cultures. In 1638 Edward Pocock, the father, traveled to the Near East and brought with him back to Oxford one of these manuscripts. For more than three decades this manuscript laid in his library until certain circumstances urged Pocock Jr. to publish it. After a succession of two centuries of Utopian writings, the publication of Hayy Ben-Yaqzan seems anachronistic and out of date. Why was the piece published in 1671 and to which philosophical style or implicit audience the piece was expected to appeal.

Carin  Berkowitz

Cornell University ( cab77@cornell.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Priority and Methodological Controversy in Early Nineteenth-Century Physiology

In the early nineteenth century, physiologists Charles Bell and François Magendie engaged in a priority dispute over the discovery of the roots of motor and sensory nerves.  The dispute illuminated the ways that different schools of biological scientists made sense of living bodies, the ways that theory and practice were taken to be mutually supportive elements of “discovery,” and the ways that various kinds of publications played a role in disputes about natural knowledge. I will discuss one part of this famous dispute here:  the role of experimentation in early nineteenth-century biological science.  For Bell, proper physiological work was based primarily on detailed anatomical dissections and extrapolations from those dissections, its basic accuracy confirmed by the vivisection of a small number of animals.  The essence of his 1811 discovery of the separate roots of the nerves was in the system he constructed and not in “experimental fact”:  this system, he argued, not only introduced a distinction between motor and sensory nerves, but also imposed unity and clarity on existing knowledge.  In 1822 Magendie, in confirming Bell’s results, reversed Bell’s assignment of motor nerves to the anterior root and sensory nerves to the dorsal root.  He argued that he had improved on Bell’s earlier work by making a proper experiment from an inadequate demonstration. The resultant clash over priority became a clash between two different models of science.  The two scientific cultures involved, divided over the place of experimentation in medical science, shaped physiology as it emerged as an independent discipline.

Sylvia  Berryman

University of British Columbia ( sberrym@interchange.ubc.ca )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Mechanics and Philosophical Theory in Antiquity

Ancient natural philosophers have long been thought to be indifferent to the discoveries of ancient mechanics, because the latter were not thought to be part of natural philosophy. I examine evidence that natural philosophers in late antiquity did consider the results of ancient mechanics to be relevant to natural philosophy.  The problems raised by the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanica and by Archimedes' work, as well as the devices used in ancient pneumatics, are considered by at least some philosophers to be material for consideration in studying the nature of matter and motion.

Paola  Bertucci

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Crafting Public Science: 18th-Century Demonstrations and Experiments Behind the Curtain

In the last few years public experiments and demonstrations have been the subject of pivotal works on the history of eighteenth-century science. The rise of public science has been highlighted as one of the crucial features of the Enlightenment. But how were such performances prepared? How and where did performers acquire the practical knowledge that they needed in order to put public demonstrations on stage? What did this entail? The paper focuses on the phases that were preliminary to the actual performance of public demonstrations and experiments. I examine how practical knowledge concerning instruments and their management or their making/maintenance was attained and transferred, how demonstrations were tailored to specific audiences, the interactions that occurred during the demonstrators' (self-)training, the diverse social spaces that demonstrators inhabited.

Richard H. Beyler

Portland State University ( beylerr@pdx.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Exhuming the "Three-Man-Paper":Target Theory Research in the Late 1930s and Early 1940s

Max Delbrück commented that the 1935 paper he co-wrote with N. W. Timoféeff-Ressovsky and K. G. Zimmer had been “buried” before Erwin Schrödinger used it as a key part of his argument in What Is Life?  But the notion that the “Three-Man Paper” (Dreimännerarbeit) was neglected is historically unwarranted–perhaps reflecting wishful thinking on Delbrück’s part after its argumentation was shown, in the late 1940s, to be flawed.  In fact, in the five to ten years after its publication, the Dreimännerarbeit constituted the canonical point of reference for a network of biophysics researchers in several countries.  Nevertheless, the article’s overall significance–whether it offered a technical innovation in an important but limited subfield in radiation biology, or a more profound insight into the fundamental structures of organism–remained uncertain. This paper compares radiation biology at three centers of biophysics–Timofeeff and Zimmer’s laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch, the KWI for Biophysics in Frankfurt, and the Radium Institute in Paris (including, notably, Salvador Luria)–showing a shared experimental practice based on the Dreimännerarbeit, but also diverging visions of how far its theoretical significance extended.

Ronald A Binzley

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( rabinzley@wisc.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Father Yancey's Albertus Magnus Guild and the Dissipation of the Crisis of the Catholic Scientist, 1952-1969

My paper brings to light the Albertus Magnus Guild, an organization of American Catholic scientists founded in 1952 that sought to address deficiencies in scientific teaching and research at Catholic institutions of higher learning.  The career of its founder, Father Patrick Yancey, SJ, as well as the Guild's activities and ultimate dissolution in the wake of the Second Vatican Council offer considerable insight into the character and development of twentieth-century Catholic science education.

Patrick J. Boner

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University ( pb331@cam.ac.uk )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - I

Kepler’s Living Cosmology: Bridging the Celestial and Terrestrial Realms

From his earliest extant correspondence, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) conceived of the cosmos as very much ‘alive and kicking’. The most extraordinary beginnings of new stars and the seemingly most insignificant hexagonal patterns of snowflakes were seen by him as the manifestations of the same underlying animate essence similarly permeating the celestial and terrestrial realms. In his ‘living world’, Kepler interpreted the origins of all material existence as the embodiment of an animate, architectonic faculty, whose inherent impression of geometrical archetypes had originally been inspired by a divine mathematical craftsman. Kepler’s conception of this animate faculty stemmed from his knowledge of nature rather than principally that of the heavens; it is thus his astrology and natural philosophy that form the focal point of my account. More specifically, I intend to concentrate on Kepler’s Harmonice mundi (1619). Here, after relating a more or less comprehensive theory of harmony, he appended an apologia elaborating on his notion of the animate faculty and its ability to exemplify and thereafter ‘appreciate’ the ‘mathematical melodies’ produced throughout the cosmos. The animistic, physiological and anatomical aspects of this faculty, I suggest, undermine accounts of Kepler’s cosmology that are entirely mechanical or mathematical.

Francesca   Bordogna

Northwestern University ( f-bordogna@northwestern.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

Pragmatist Travelers: Mediating the Local and the Cosmopolitan

This paper examines the practices, including especially travel, through which a range of philosopher-scientists who were associated in some ways with pragmatism and who lived in widely different national and local contexts represented themselves as part of an ephemeral cosmopolitan group. The Americans William James, Charles Augustus Strong, Joseph B. Stallo, the Swiss Theodore Flournoy, the Italians Giovanni Papini and Giovanni Vailati,the British F. C. S. Schiller, and the German-speaking Wilhelm Jerusalem, among others, traveled to see one another in person; they sent each other parcels, cablegrams, postal cards, books, and portraits; they translated each other’s works, invited each other to their homes and summer places, and visited tourist sites together. At a time when many scientists and philosophers traveled to enforce universal regimes of objectivity, these figures’ travels led them to accentuate the importance of the local and the particular in the production of knowledge. This paper explores the tension between the local and the cosmopolitan that marked many of these philosopher-scientists’ epistemologies and research practices.

Eric W Boyle

University of California Santa Barbara ( eboyle@umail.ucsb.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Rockefeller Philanthropy and the Scientific Solution to Health and Social Problems

Early twentieth-century public health campaigns helped control devastating diseases and saved countless lives, but the promotion of more scientific approaches to health problems left many challenging questions about the role of social and economic conditions in the spread of disease.  My paper argues that the ambitious effort of the Rockefeller medical philanthopies to “promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world” sometimes failed to adequately address the relationship between such social, economic, and health problems because an underlying faith in medical science superceded a more holistic approach.  In the specific area of public health campaigns, this meant the guiding principles and values of the the Rockefeller medical philanthropies played a pivotal role in the process of defining an approach to health that emphasized the targeting, treatment, and eradication of specific disease, which ultimately encouraged a therapeutic model of specificity over a multifaceted or generalized approach which allowed for a variety of factors in the epidemiology of disease.  In the process, treatment methods were legitimized by their very specific action with specific diseases and a more sophisticated understanding of disease processes emerging from laboratory studies.  Meanwhile, internal debates raged among Rockefeller board members and field workers over the relative importance of social and economic inequalities, although these factors received less attention in the United States than other countries.  I argue that this difference was largely a product of organizational challenges faced by the Rockefeller philanthropies.  First, a lack of coordination in the U.S. between public health campaigns, the funding of scientific research, educational reform efforts, and projects for economic improvement led to internal conflicts and the desire to develop a more specialized purpose for Rockefeller programs.  Meanwhile, in foreign countries, Rockefeller work was more often conducted and coordinated through one centralized body rather than dispersed through a group of independently operated progams.   A second organizational challenge, which also helps explain this difference, was largely the prduct of a tension between the nearly unanimous public and governmental support of philanthropic resources for resolving health problems and the continued reluctance to support the philanthropic funding of solutions to social and economic problems.  Despite these tensions, I suggest the Rockefeller medical philanthropies still effectively shaped the response to health and social problems by providing unparalleled financial support that instilled a particular purpose and set of values in scientific and medical research along with their therapeutic applications in the realm of public health.

Michael  Bresalier

Cambridge University ( mcb37@hermes.cam.ac.uk )

Friday  4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Neutralizing Flu:  Immunological Technique and its Legitimation in Interwar Virus Work

In the 1920s and 1930s “viruses diseases” emerged as a new medical category and “viruses” presented novel problems for medical science. Visualizing viruses and forging their identity with human diseases were key issues in interwar virus work, and immunological techniques figured centrally in tackling them. The most widely used of these techniques was the neutralization test. Developed for the identification of specific “virus neutralizing” antibodies in human and animal sera, this test was employed in the investigation of numerous virus diseases and became a crucial tool for work on virus identification, immunity and vaccine development. Virus neutralization was a technique that defined interwar virus research.__This paper explores this relationship by tracing the making and use of a standard neutralization test for influenza virus at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in London. NIMR workers first isolated flu virus in ferrets by in 1933, and they soon adapted the virus to mice. By 1935, they had developed a neutralization test based on visualizing the histo-pathological interaction of flu virus and serum antibodies in mice lungs. Flu workers across the world took up this test. For NIMR workers their test was necessary for making virus research relevant to the medical problems presented by influenza. By following how they applied the test to flu epidemiology, immunity, and vaccine trials, I argue that virus neutralization was a technique that linked virus work to hospital medicine and public health.  Through these connections, flu was legitimated as a “virus disease”. The story of the NIMR’s virus neutralization test underscores the historical importance of immunological techniques in the formation of twentieth century virus research.

Paul  Brinkman

University of Minnesota ( brin0142@umn.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

The Second American Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, 1895-1905

In the 1890s, the institutional setting for American vertebrate paleontology shifted from private collections to urban museums funded by large-scale philanthropy, including the American Museum in New York, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago.  This shift ignited a fierce competition among paleontologists to find, collect, and display fossil vertebrates, especially gigantic Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs from the American West.  Museums launched ambitious expeditions aimed at collecting exhibit-quality dinosaurs.  Fieldworkers developed new, better procedures for excavating, packing, and handling fossils.  Preparators, likewise, developed revolutionary techniques for removing fossils from their rocky matrix, and for mounting them for display.  The object of building composite skeletons from the accumulated parts of individual dinosaurs encouraged “lumping,” rather than “splitting” taxa, which was the norm during the first Jurassic dinosaur rush.  Henry Fairfield Osborn, founder and first curator of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum, and chief protagonist of the second Jurassic dinosaur rush, emphasized that early 20th century vertebrate paleontology was a cooperative venture.  But Osborn and his rivals were every bit as competitive, petty and proprietary as their infamous 19th century predecessors, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

Nicholas  Buchanan

Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( nscb@mit.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Epistemological Imperialism: Experts, American Indians, and the Production of Environmental Knowledge

This paper examines the contested histories of a river and of the American Indians who lived along it. I focus on the intersection of three sources of authority--history, science, and the law--and explore how different groups used these sources to produce knowledge about the past, knowledge that in turn reproduced existing patterns of power.  In 1975, the US Department of the Interior filed suit against approximately 150 landowners along the Williamson River in southern Oregon (US v. Adair).  The purpose of the lawsuit was to establish the federal government’s superior water rights in several National Forests located on land previously owned by the Klamath Tribes of American Indians.  For complex reasons of western American water law, the distribution of water rights in 1975 depended on the indigenous uses of water, as well as the river’s hydrology, during the 1860s.  As a result, the Klamath Indians’ social, cultural, and environmental histories became central issues in the case.  In this paper, I explore how expert witnesses marshaled scientific and historical evidence to construct and defend conflicting versions of the past, and how courtroom rules and the unwritten codes of expert credibility excluded American Indians from this process.  By making the history (and therefore the present) of the Klamath Indians contingent on western modes of knowledge production, I argue that the Adair case was epistemological imperialism.

Glenn Ymballa Cabrera

 ( gcab1804@netzero.com )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Japanese Scientific Societies and Their Historical Lessons for the Philippines

The 20th Century development of scientific societies in Japan and in a developing country like the Philippines constitute a study in contrast. Scientific societies have been more numerous, diverse and dynamic in Japan than in the Philippines. In this paper I attempt to answer the question, and isolate the crucial factors that help explain, why scientific communities developed feebly in the last century in the Philippines while they have flourished in Japan. My findings are based primarily on Philippine historical experience. While I proceed from the assumption that any institution-based explanation of Japan’s economic achievement in the 20th Century has to take these knowledge guilds into account, my paper also concludes that a country’s level of economic development affects the evolution of its scientific communities. Some policy implications are drawn from the results of the paper.

Joe  Cain

University College London ( J.Cain@ucl.ac.uk )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Ritual Patricide: George Gaylord Simpson’s Value to the Next Generation

Simpson was the undisputed American heavy-weight in macroevolutionary theory prior to paleobiology’s disciplinary formation in the 1970s. Simpson’s intellectual influence on this next generation of thinkers is tied intimately to aggressive and bitter disputes regarding continuity versus originality. In the process, Simpson’s macroevolutionary views were attacked in volleys of empirical and theoretical criticism. They also were attacked on historical and philosophical grounds, as workers struggled to distinguish new from old. These attacks took on an intensity well beyond the norm for contentiousness theoretical disputes. These events are best understood as ritual patricide. The fight with Simpson functioned as a unifying force in the frantic discipline building underway in macroevolutionary studies during the 1970s.

Laurie  Carlson

 ( Laucarlson@aol.com )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

William Spillman's Role in Genetics History: Icon or Iconoclast?

William Jasper Spillman has been called a “co-discoverer” of Mendel and lauded for his role as a founder of American genetics science.  He was the first to understand and replicate Mendel's laws of inherited characteristics and successfully applied theory to creating hardy wheat varieties, launching what would eventually lead to the Green Revolution. He also argued for environmental effects, however, and opposed the ideology of the growing eugenics movement in the 1910s. He saw deviance as a positive; eugenics viewed it as a negative.  Ultimately, he faced the problem created by agricultural genetics: overproduction, and tried to resolve the dilemma by advocating diversified agriculture, or “balanced farming.”

David  Caruso

Cornell University ( djc52@cornell.edu )

Friday  4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

The Body Counts:

The Technologies of Triage and Redefining Medical Knowledge and Practice during the First World War

During the First World War, American military medical personnel were trapped in the position of serving two masters: they were responsible for the health of the soldier as well as the health of the military establishment.  The interaction and relationship between medicine and the military were highly problematic, requiring the reorganization of medical knowledge and practice regarding soldiers' health.  I focus my historical study on triage, using the process of sorting, categorizing, and treating bodies as a site of conflict between the institutional cultures of the American military and medicine.  Triage was developed and refined in military contexts, where a variety of factors—more apparent, perhaps, than in everyday hospital situations—determined the classification of wounds and diseases, shaping the ways in which medical knowledge was applied to soldiers.  Bodies and body counts came to symbolize the innovations in military technology, the rapid industrialization and modernization of warfare and war tactics, and shifts in educational, structural, professional, and cultural perceptions of medicine.  Looking at the ways in which medical knowledge was blended with military hierarchies and priorities to literally organize injured bodies on battlefronts, demonstrates not only the reconstruction and reinterpretation of medical knowledge, but also the effects that these transformations had on the military and medical institutions themselves during and after the war.

Elizabeth Mary Cavicchi

Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, MIT, and Univ. of Mass Boston

( elizabeth_cavicchi@post.harvard.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Blind Experimenting in a Sighted World: The Electrical Innovations of Jonathan Nash Hearder

Experimental science is visually intensive:  seeing things happen, positioning apparatus, reading meters.  Is such work closed to the visually impaired?  Electricity sparks, but it also shocks, providing touch-sensitive feedback to experimenters.  The invention of alternatives to conventional sighted experimenting is exemplified by Jonathan Nash Hearder (1809-1876), a native of Plymouth UK blinded in youth by his own chemical explosion.  By taking advantage of non-visual techniques and clues, he developed multiple, informing perspectives on electrical behaviors.  For example, steadily moving a paper strip through his famous induction coil’s spark gap enabled him to feel perforation holes and thus estimate its frequency -- which was also sounding as an audible tone.  In constructing an induction coil having effects superior to those of renowned Parisian instrument-maker Ruhmkorff, Hearder adapted novel insulating materials he had already pioneered for manufacturing waterproof umbrellas and fishing tackle.  To test the faulty Atlantic Cable of 1858, while it docked at Plymouth, Hearder inserted his tongue into the two thousand-mile long circuit.  However, while Hearder advanced his personal experimenting by non-visual means, the fact of his blindness was typically suppressed from his public image as an authority on electromagnetism, medical electricity, and fishing tackle.  When this fact was raised by others, tones of derision, pity, sensation, and respect colored their portrayals of Hearder’s work.  In his legacy, personal circumstances fragmented from the public accomplishments.  As a result, Hearders’ innovations with non-visual evidence in experimenting became inaccessible to communities who might benefit from his efforts.  Ultimately, science is diminished when myths persist about who can make experimental contributions, and who cannot.

Hasok  Chang

University College London ( h.chang@ucl.ac.uk )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - J

The Unbearable Fickleness of the Boiling Point

Every schoolboy knows that pure water boils at 100 degrees centigrade under standard pressure. Like most things that every schoolboy knows, this is a myth. Starting with De Luc's work published in 1772, the boiling point of water was observed to vary greatly depending on many factors. For example, Gay-Lussac reported in 1812 that the temperature of boiling water was over 1 degree higher in a glass vessel than in a metallic vessel; De Luc achieved a temperature of 112 degrees in liquid water, by removing dissolved air from it. I have repeated some of the simple key experiments dating from that period, and confirmed most of the reported results about the variability of the boiling point; if possible, video footage of the most striking experiments will be shown. These results raise some important questions. The variability is easy to observe and it was well-known 200 years ago; why isn't it widely known now? I argue that this is an instance of a general phenomenon in which some scientific knowledge gets lost due to the necessities of specialist research. I also argue for a novel role for the history of science, which is to recover, and extend, such lost knowledge. Experimental replications carried out in this context has a different purpose than usual: not to reproduce the historical conditions precisely, but to find the best ways of studying the forgotten phenomena.

Fabien  Chareix

University of Paris 4 - Sorbonne ( fabien.chareix@paris4.sorbonne.fr )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Christiaan Huygens and the Probability of Knowledge

Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) is known to have mixed experientia and ratio in the making of his genuine natural philosophy. This should be taken seriously to give an account of Huygens' permanent use of both theoretical tools and experimental devices, all along his scientific carreer. Measurements, precision clockworks, pneumatical machines or investigations on the properties of some crystals are the evidences of the role played by the experimental philosophy in the works of the Dutch physicist. However almost all commentators have focused on his belonging to a cartesian tradition where experiments are not primarily required and eventually, dismissed. We would like to focus the texts, letters, manuscripts or published treatises, where the so-called rationalism of Huygens' thought turns to be much more empirically grounded than one could exspect it. There is a tension in Huygens' writings between the certainty of geometrical demonstrations and the mere probability of what we are forced to "suppose" in the real making of physical sciences. Thus the two orientations of natural philosophy that historians used to depict as "english vs continental" seem to have, in the case of Huygens, merged into an original theory of knowledge.

Alex  Checkovich

University of Virginia ( ajc3f@virginia.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Problem Areas: Regions, Representations, and Authorities in the Great Depression

This paper shows how cartographic practices intersected with scientific, technological and environmental developments during the 1930s and early 1940s.  Professional mappers associated with the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies – TVA, AAA, SCS, CCC, BAE, WPA – had an opportunity to stake out “problem areas” on the national map.  Aerial photographic surveys made, for the first time, such an awesome task manageable – and, it seemed, creditable.  The perceived necessity of the task, in turn, spurred experimentation with a host of surveying and representational techniques.  The result was a massive archive of diverse land-utilization classifications assembled piecemeal over a full decade.  Such a store of empirical geographical knowledge structured the debates and activities of land users who ranged from bureaucrats and planners to businessmen and farmers.  The particular geographical aspects of the nation that New Deal scientists and engineers mastered – soil and crop zones, forest types, erosion districts, livelihood areas – were built into their maps and, more importantly, into the political functions and architectures of their respective agencies.  As a result, their representations of regions did not so much reflect as create – bring into being on the ground – the lived-in realities of American landscapes.  For better or worse, we have lived ever since with the economic and political consequences of this distinctly cartographic statecraft. 

Nuran  Cinlar

Simmons College ( ncinlar@simmons.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Evaluating the Risk of New World Colonization: Investors in the Virginia Company, 1606-1624

In the decades preceding the emergence of the formal mathematics of probability, European investors began behaving more daringly, yet believed they had better judgment regarding risk than previous generations.  New World colonization efforts in particular became more attractive to private investors, at a time when geopolitical and economic factors had not changed appreciably.  What accounts for the new willingness to invest in New World ventures?  This paper examines the quantitative reasoning of Virginia Company investors between 1606 and 1624.  Based primarily on a close reading of the papers of the Virginia Company of London, with some study of the overall investment profile of company members – many of whom took part in multiple international ventures simultaneously – this paper investigates a profound new willingness to undertake risk, and new ability to organize that risk when shaping new ventures.  It examines the fiscal calculations, but also the changing language in which company members defined and analyzed the risks of their new world venture. This paper thus examines the rise of probabilistic thinking and a new psychology of risk in the decades before Pascal and Fermat began to formalize the mathematics of probability.

Dina Dalouka and co-author Aristotle Tympas

History and Philosophy of Science Department, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

( kdalouka@phs.uoa.gr ) - Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Electric Power Networks and Interwar Scientific Ontologies:

Competing Orientations in the Early History of Computing (AkeraAl907)

Between 1770 and 1790 a gentleman of Verona chose astronomy as a subject of a series of frescoes decorating his patrician villa. The paper takes such paintings as historical resources for an analysis of the aristocracy’s scientific culture in eighteenth-century Veneto. We shall see how, at first, astronomical scenes were set in the context of conversations and domestic entertainment, whereas in the course of twenty years they turned into more abstract and formal representations. By following the changes in the gentleman’s taste, I argue that at the end of the century the mathematical and physical sciences had become essential elements in the exhibition of the upper class’s culture.

Shelley Anne Costa

Independent Scholar ( scosta1@swarthmore.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Words and Deeds:  English Economies of Print and Gentility Behind Eighteenth-Century Public Mathematics

The exchange of mathematical questions and answers in recreational periodicals gave rise to a vibrant mathematical public sphere in eighteenth-century England.  This paper looks at the economic structures behind editing and producing such periodicals.  I will present ways in which a new economy of print both contrasted with and reinforced an older, land-based economy and discuss what this meant for a mathematical public.  For example, the two economies supported distinct forms of patronage that guided how mathematics appeared before the reading public.

Kathleen  Crowther-Heyck

University of Oklahoma ( kch@ou.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Sacred Philosophy, Secular Theology:

 The Pious Physics of Levinus Lemnius (1505-1568) and Francisco Vallés (1524-1592)

In the sixteenth century, a number of natural philosophers attempted to create an explicitly Christian natural philosophy, based both on a close reading of biblical passages dealing with the natural world and engagement with a wide variety of natural philosophical writers and ideas.  In this literature, the Bible was used to adjudicate between competing natural philosophical views and natural philosophical ideas were used to explicate difficult passages in the Bible.  This tight integration of biblical exegesis and natural philosophy was recognized by contemporaries as a novel approach to both.  Despite the ongoing interest in the relations between religion and science in the early modern period, these "pious natural philosophers" have been largely ignored by historians of science.  In this talk, I analyze the writings of two of the most prominent and widely read "pious natural philosophers" of the sixteenth century, Levinus Lemnius and Francisco Vallés.  I argue that their work was shaped by two important developments in biblical exegesis.  First, their pious physics was connected to the increased emphasis on the literal sense of the Bible.  Second, pious natural philosophy was shaped by the renewed centrality of biblical exegesis to theology itself.  My discussion of the work of Lemnius and Vallés is intended to suggest that an analysis of pious natural philosophy more generally could provide new insights into the richness and complexity of the relationships between science and religion in the early modern period.

Serafina  Cuomo

Imperial College London ( s.cuomo@imperial.ac.uk )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Contested Definitions of Techne in  Classical Athens._

This paper aims to explore the question: what is techne? through the examination of one particular case, the techne of medicine. As is well known, various technai and medicine in particular were extensively discussed by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, while contemporary medical writers were also engaged in defining their specific form of knowledge. I will analyse the characteristics of medicine in particular, and techne in general, as they arise from these texts, point out the differences between them and try to relate the discrepancies to wider notions of knowledge, power and society. Ultimately, I intend to argue that the boundaries between techne and other forms of knowledge were kept strategically flexible, and that definitions of techne depend to a crucial extent on ideas about the repositories of techne, i.e. the technicians._

Arthur   Daemmrich

Chemical Heritage Foundation ( arthurd@chemheritage.org )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Pharmaceutical Demand Realization

In the past five years, the pharmaceutical industry has come under perhaps the highest degree of government and public scrutiny since the early 1960s and has sunk in stature in opinion polls. Industry, regulators, and policy makers face a dilemma: on the one hand, pharmaceuticals continue to prolong life and reduce suffering from disease; on the other, taking drugs “for life” has intensified a long-standing hybrid of scientific, medical, emotional, and policy issues around pharmaceuticals. Recent controversies over pharmaceutical safety and marketing have also brought to the fore widespread resentment of companies that profit from inventing and marketing drugs and have drawn attention to a transition in the relationship of research and development to sales and marketing that took place across the industry since 1990. Yet the pharmaceutical industry is not a monolith and even within firms, there are often sharp divisions of opinion concerning the strategies employed to realize market demand for new drugs._This paper offers historical and sociological analysis of a framework for “demand realization” developed at one global pharmaceutical firm. The framework was created and implemented in order to harmonize marketing approaches while still allowing sales approaches to match varying national medical cultures around the world. For this company, the demand realization framework made explicit shifting boundaries (and competing constructions of these boundaries) between marketing and research. A specific set of “archetypes” within the framework expected that clinical trials would be integrated with marketing campaigns. Put differently, marketing leaders sought to have phase-III trials address questions that research leaders challenged as unscientific or of little medical value. Though negotiated anew for each new drug, resolution of disputes over what could count as a medical or scientific question had impacts for the firm's relations to patients, government regulators and physicians. The paper concludes with an analysis of the consequences of “demand realization” for the internal construction of values at the company - and across the industry - and for definitions of safety, efficacy, and side effects that companies market along with their drugs._

Ivano  Dal Prete

University of Verona ( eldalpre@tiscali.it )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Astronomy for the Aristocracy: Representing Science in Eighteenth-Century Venetian Provinces.

Between 1770 and 1790 a gentleman of Verona chose astronomy as a subject of a series of frescoes decorating his patrician villa. The paper takes such paintings as historical resources for an analysis of the aristocracy’s scientific culture in eighteenth-century Veneto. We shall see how, at first, astronomical scenes were set in the context of conversations and domestic entertainment, whereas in the course of twenty years they turned into more abstract and formal representations. By following the changes in the gentleman’s taste, I argue that at the end of the century the mathematical and physical sciences had become essential elements in the exhibition of the upper class’s culture.

Dorien  Daling

University of Groningen  ( w.d.daling@let.rug.nl )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

The Creative Role of Scientific Journals:

 Biochimica et Biophysica Acta and the Formation of a Discipline after the Second World War

Scientific journals are not merely vehicles of knowledge; they have many other roles and functions. This paper examines the role of Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA), the first journal in the field of biochemistry with a fully international editorial board, in the formation of the discipline of biochemistry. Established in the Netherlands in 1946, BBA seems to have been an important factor in strengthening biochemistry as an independent scientific discipline of international standing in the Netherlands. Moreover, the founding fathers of BBA aimed at furthering a modern, physical-chemical avenue of biochemical research - the addition 'et Biophysica' in the title of the journal was a clear indication of the scientific trend that the editors wanted to promote. Many important aspects of the evolving molecular biology were covered by the journal: in early BBA one can find many 'first examples' which initiated a new area of research. After 1960, however, the journal lost its image as an innovative journal (in the field of molecular biology). Some of the editors of BBA were very much opposed to the emancipation of molecular biology and its ascent as a dominant disciplinary trend. BBA developed into a forum for biochemists concerned to defend their discipline's boundaries and image. I will suggest that scientific journals are much more than mere collections of articles and explore how they stimulate changes in the form of science.

Edward (Ted) B Davis

Messiah College ( tdavis@messiah.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Cosmic Beauty, Created Order, and the Divine Word: The Religious Thought of Michael Idvorsky Pupin

Columbia University physicist Michael Idvorsky Pupin (1858-1935) is usually remembered today for his discoveries of secondary x-rays and the mathematical theory of loaded transmission lines.  In his own day, however, his life story was widely publicized in the United States as an example of a successful immigrant from Eastern Europe, and his many writings on science and religion were well known.  As a devout Serbian Orthodox believer, Pupin’s theology of nature emphasized a central idea of the Eastern Orthodox religious tradition: the presence of beauty and order in the universe as manifestations of the transcendent divine Word (of John’s gospel) that has brought all things into being, the same divine Word who has been most clearly revealed in Jesus Christ.  In addition, the special attention he gave to wave motion and other forms of energy, which he interpreted as the principal means by which the immanent God creates and maintains order in the universe, apparently reflects St. Gregory Palamas’  teaching that God’s ongoing activity in the creation is an aspect of the divine “energies.”  Finally, consistent with Orthodox worship and contemplation, he believed that scientific knowledge only enhanced the believer’s ability to participate in the mystery and beauty of heaven.  In short, for Pupin the whole cosmos was an icon through which the glory and wisdom of the ineffable creator could be seen.

Frederick R Davis

Florida State University ( fdavis@fsu.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Geographies of Toxicology: Testing DDT in the Lab, Field, and Body

The story of the toxicological assessment of DDT blurs the artificial / natural distinction on many levels. DDT was one of the first widely used synthetic insecticides. Contrary to popular myth, it underwent extensive testing during and immediately following the Second World War. Scientists tested DDT in lab animals (mice, rats, rabbits, and dogs as well as wild animals in the lab). US Public Health Officials attempted carefully controlled field studies as did the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Tests in humans (soldiers and prisoners) were some of the most contrived. Military doctors placed cubes of body lice on treated soldiers to test the effectiveness of DDT impregnated clothing while prison volunteers ingested small doses of DDT on a daily basis.  Ultimately, DDT's apparent safety hinged on the inability to test for chronic as opposed to acute effects.  As the first synthetic insecticide to be widely deployed in economic entomology, DDT represents an inherently unnatural substance yet its use had profound ramifications in nature despite the efforts of scientists to assess its potential toxicity.

Sheila Ann Dean

Darwin Correspondence Project, Cornell University ( sad33@cornell.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - I

Edinburgh Gardener to Curator in Calcutta: John Scott goes to India

Son of a tenant farmer, John Scott labored as a gardener at several private houses before becoming foreman of the propagating department at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. His interest in botanical experimentation did not endear him to his superiors, nor did his support of the Darwinism that was viewed skeptically by some in Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century. Scott's growing role as Charles Darwin's long-distance and valued experimentalist, or his "scientific gardener", provided him with the finances and connections needed for travel to India; there he gained employment as curator of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, later also researching poppy varieties on an opium plantation. Limited by his social position in Britain, Scott's expanding and unusual career in India, reinforced by correspondence with men of science at home, resulted in a unique exchange of scientific information and culture between India and Britain; his contributions to Indian horticulture and botany, and to British science, differed from those of the formally-educated superintendents and directors of colonial botanic gardens.

William  deJong-Lambert

Columbia University ( WRL4@columbia.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Szczepan Pieniazek: Polish Lysenkoist

This paper is an examination of the career of one of the foremost promoters of Lysenkoism in Poland, Szczepan Pienizek. Pienizek was an agronomist whose involvement in communist activities began before the Second World War. He was on a fellowship at Cornell University when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and he spent the war in the United States. With the establishment of the socialist regime after the war he returned to Poland and became a leading figure in the Michurinist movement, and headed an agricultural research institute which was the center of Michurinist research. His own account of his activities during this period is made of contradictory statements: On the one hand he says he “truly believed”, but also said that promoting Lysenkoism was his “compromise with power.” This paper uses Pienizek as a case study to explore the choices individuals make in supporting scientific doctrines in response to various political rewards and methods of coercion. The information presented is the product of a year spent in Poland on a Fulbright-Hays grant, conducting research for a dissertation on the topic of Lysenkoism in Poland.

Michael S. Dodson

Indiana University Bloomington ( msdodson@indiana.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

A Translational Moment: Sanskrit and/as the Text of Modernity

This paper examines the strategies and practices of translation between English and Sanskrit within the contested domain of governmental educational institutions in colonial north India during the later part of the nineteenth century.  In particular, the ideological and pragmatic concerns which underpinned the translation of English-language scientific works into Sanskrit by European educationalists and their Indian interlocutors-rivals are discussed, including the creation of specialised scientific nomenclatures.  Yet the strategies of translation, in particular, in this context can be seen to highlight the diverse ideas held by Europeans and Indians of the relationship between language, civilisational identity, and modernity.  As such, it is proposed that a historical examination of translation as an integral part of the creation of the texts of scientific education forms a unique opportunity to illuminate the workings of colonial power and emerging Indian nationalist discourse.

Ian  Dowbiggin

University of Prince Edward Island ( idowbiggin@upei.ca )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Sterilization, American Freedom and Catholic Power: A Revisionist Interpretation of Eugenics

For some time now scholars have noted that besides its appeal to conservatives and the political right, eugenics also enjoyed considerable international popularity among Socialists and other political radicals.  Yet the attraction to American liberals of eugenic ideas and policies, including the sterilization of the poor and people with disabilities, has not received the same scholarly attention.  This paper, based on the records of the Manhattan-based Human Betterment Association of America (HBAA), a group advocating sterilization as a birth control method domestically and overseas during the Cold War, argues that numerous prominent U.S. liberals supported contraceptive policies that targeted vulnerable and underprivileged social groups and blurred the distinctions between coercion and informed consent.  Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and HBAA members such as bioethicist Joseph Fletcher and Paul Blanshard, author of the 1949 runaway best-seller American Freedom and Catholic Power, tended to oppose Catholic influence over policy-making in fields such as education and medicine.   The history of the HBAA between World War II and the 1960s reveals that disputes over sterilization helped to spark a fierce culture war at a time when U.S. liberals feared that the Catholic Church enjoyed far too much power over the nation’s attitudes toward sex, reproduction, and death.  This history also indicates that the emergence lately of what some observers call a “liberal eugenics” based on voluntarist use of recent genetic and reproductive technologies is far from new and features many of the same disturbing illiberal tendencies of earlier eugenic policies.

Eric  Drown

George Washington University ( edrown@gwu.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom – A

Self-Invention:  The Promise and Peril of Pulp Science Fiction's Educational Rhetoric in Industrializing America

In the late 1920s, in response to teachers' and librarians' criticism of pulp magazines as sensational trash, science fiction editor Hugo Gernsback promised readers that they could learn as much science from 12 issues of his Amazing Stories as they could from a year-long college course.  Moreover, he said, science fiction presented scientific information in a way that was easy to understand and fun to learn, unlike the “dry” textbooks colleges used.  Most importantly, he went on, science fiction taught readers the imaginative but disciplined mental habits of scientists better than attendance at academic lectures.  In this presentation, I investigate how this educational rhetoric functioned for the first generation of passionate science fiction readers.  Young men unable to afford college, and so, destined for wage-earning work as clerks, salesmen, technicians, mechanics, or laborers, saw science as means of class ascent.  But since, in pulp science fiction's edisonades, science was embodied by maverick inventors working independently of large corporations, science fiction readers were working with archaic notions of the educational requirements and the institutional and financial imperatives of modern science.  In spite of this misperception, stories about independent inventors provided readers with ways of understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the cultural conceits of Progressive education reformers.

Sven  Dupré

Ghent University ( Sven.Dupre@UGent.be )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - J

A Clever Daedalus to Describe this Thing:

 Visualizing Telescopes, Machines and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Optics

In a seminal article on the telescope in the seventeenth century (in which he stressed the importance of craft skills to the development of the telescope) Albert Van Helden complained - and rightly so - that 'the traditional treatment of the telescope is replete with optical diagrams … with the result that one is left with the impression that the telescope was an instrument which, if not invented through science, was at any rate turned into the sophisticated instrument it became by science. In this paper I will attempt to show that the modernized optical diagrams also hardly do justice to the way in which the historical actors communicated about the telescope. Contemporary visualizations of the telescope are revealing of the seventeenth-century conceptualization of the telescope, in particular, of the mediation between theoretical, practical and instrumental knowledge. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the telescope was a new type of instrument different from the well-known 'mathematical' instruments. While to contempories it was well-known how to picture a mathematical instrument, the telescope presented new problems of representation, because the description of the construction and manipulation of the instrument did not seem to fall together with a description of the knowledge involved in understanding the working of the instrument (as it was the case with mathematical instruments). In this paper I will follow the struggle to find a way how best to visualize the telescope and the knowledge it embodied in the course of the seventeenth century. It will also be helpful to look at the emergence of visualizations of grinding machines (which were remarkably absent - with the exception of Leonardo's - before the invention of the telescope). I will discuss the functions of these visualizations and how these functions relate to the context in which the visualizations were used and to the audiences which seventeenth-century optics wished to reach.

Erika  Dyck

McMaster University ( erika.dyck@ualberta.ca )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

LSD Does not Expand the Mind, the Drug Shrinks It: Post-WWII LSD Experimentation and the Politics of Consciousness

In the early 1950s psychiatrists in Saskatchewan began exploring the therapeutic value of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD.  Humphry Osmond (who coined the term ‘psychedelic’) described the LSD reaction as a mind-manifesting experience that altered perception and expanded consciousness.  Throughout the decade Osmond explored this altered state of consciousness for its therapeutic potential in the mental health field.  In particular, he found intriguing results with subjects suffering from alcoholism.  Spiritual or transcendental experiences described by alcoholic patients undergoing psychedelic treatment indicated that LSD offered a powerful adjunct to psychotherapy.  The psychedelic approach to treating alcoholism brought together ideas of biochemical therapy and spiritual enlightenment, challenging orthodox medical theories.  Prior to the cultural hysteria over recreational LSD (acid) abuse, LSD treatments provoked professional challenges from practitioners who discounted the clinical benefits of a reaction that was unpredictable, impossible to quantify, and performed poorly in controlled trials.  Advocates of psychedelic therapies maintained that trials with controls disrupted the LSD experience.  Despite arguments made by psychiatrists and their patients, LSD treatments moved to the fringes of the pharmacological revolution as psychedelic experiments appeared at odds with contemporary clinical trials.  The consciousness-expanding properties of LSD remained reminiscent of psychoanalysis and by the mid-1960s this association, in combination with the cultural fears precipitated by recreational ‘acid’ abuse, made LSD experimentation in mainstream science untenable.  This paper investigates the professional tensions that grew out of debates over the role of consciousness in post-war psychopharmacological research.

Otniel  E. Dror

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ( otniel@md.huji.ac.il )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Sudden Unexpected Death: Contingency, Magic, and the Uncertainty of Signs

In this presentation I study the history of ‘sudden unexpected death’ during the post-Second World War period. Sudden death--the abrupt cessation of life in a seemingly healthy individual--emerged as a major focus of physiological and clinical concerns during the 1950s and 1960s in the West. I draw on Ronald Barthes’ analysis of the fait divers, Philip Fisher’s study of the Vehement Passions, and the history of medicine and physiology, in order to study the disruptive dimensions of ‘sudden-death’. I argue that postwar ‘sudden unexpected death,’ which was conceived as characteristic of modern Western lives, was modeled on ‘voodoo death’--which during the interwar years had been framed as a distinct phenomenon of non-Western and ‘primitive’ cultures._I conclude that voodoo- and sudden-death retain a magical presence in the midst of modern biomedicine, generating new models and possibilities regarding the mind-body problem, the status of the dead body (i.e., the autopsy), the reality behind alternative modes of healing, and the placebo and nocebo effects.

Jack  El-Hai

 ( jack@el-hai.com )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Inside the Mind of a Lobotomist: Walter Freeman and the Rise and Fall of Psychiatric Surgery

The presenter is the author of The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness (John Wiley & Sons, 2005).  He will discuss the crucial role of neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman in the development and promotion of lobotomy between 1936 and 1967.  The presenter will also examine the clues in Freeman's personal life and professional career that lead to an understanding of what motivated Freeman to advocate on behalf of mutilating brain surgery to treat mental illness and what caused him to support lobotomy long past the introduction of safer and more effective drug treatments in the 1950s.  Included in the presentation will be rarely seen video footage of lobotomy operations Freeman performed in 1940 and 1949.

Lynne Osman Elkin

California State University East Bay (Hayward) ( lelkin@csuhayward.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Rosalind Franklin and DNA: 2003 Fame, Justice Pending

During the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Double Helix, the Franklin biography by Brenda Maddox, The Dark Lady of DNA, and its concomitant NOVA, The Secret of Photo 51 broadcast most  strongly criticized Watson and Crick for inadequate acknowledgment of their use of Franklin's essential data.  However Maddox, like most writers and speakers, stops short of criticizing their unauthorized appropriation of Franklin data, without which they would not have solved the structure of DNA as early as March 1953. Similarly, with only a few notable exceptions, almost all reviewers of Watson's account or of Maddox's biography fail to criticize their behavior.  Only Anne Sayre in her 1975 biography, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, frames her criticism in ethical terms and expresses concern about the poor example Watson and Crick set for young scientists.  The unrestrained praise of Watson and Crick by scholars appears like a roadmap for questionable ethics. Until praise for their brilliant theoretical deduction is tempered by some criticism of their behavior, there will be no justice for Franklin and no lesson about the ethical use of other scientists' data.  Finally a more balanced approach is beginning to emerge, specifically in a play by Sidney Perkowitz, Glory Enough, a movie by David Baxter, The Broken Code, and my own lectures and written work, a Physics Today article (March 2003) and a biography in progress, both titled Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix.

Erik  Ellis

Oregon State University ( erik.ellis@asu.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

'The TV Problem' in 1950s America: Finding a Place for Science on the Small Screen

While science popularization has received considerable attention from scholars in recent years, there has been very little attention paid to the role of television in this process.  This paper examines the origins of the National Education Television network in the mid 1950s, and uses a set of marine biology programs developed by Dixy Lee Ray to illustrate the confluence of specific science-education goals with larger social objectives of those advocating non-commercial television.  Science, I argue, represented one of the most powerful discourses available to television programmers seeking to harness this burgeoning technology for cultural betterment.

Marwa  Elshakry

Harvard University ( elshakry@fas.harvard.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

'Knowledge' into 'Science': The Arabic Press and Epistemological Transformations                                  

The print revolution and widespread translation movement that took place in Ottoman Egypt during the nineteenth century generated vigorous discussions about science, and about the nature and classification of knowledge itself. For example, ‘ilm—traditionally one of the broadest terms for knowledge in Arabic [including knowledge of ultimate causes, i.e. God]—acquired new meanings [e.g. scientific knowledge, based on demonstrable evidence.] By the century’s end, the term was coming to mean different things to different confessional and professional groups—from the ‘ulama, or religious scholarly classes, to the new Western-educated technocratic elite. This paper will analyze late nineteenth century translations of Western science into Arabic to show how they reflected the rise of increasingly distinct epistemological communities.

James  Elwick

York University ( jelwick@yorku.ca )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

Regarding the Sympathy of Others: Herbert Spencer and Humane Suffering

Herbert Spencer, the cosmic optimist, loudly emphasized political, economic and personal freedom.  This paper instead examines Spencerian liberty’s dark twin: the suffering caused by wrong choices and the pain that served to educate consciences in order to prevent greater future misery.  This emphasis on punishment emerged from Spencer’s evangelical and phrenological roots, and meshed with his Lamarckism.  He posed this against State action taken to alleviate suffering.  The paper also examines how Spencer disliked the “cheap pity” caused by the Victorian media’s representations of suffering, because they allowed sympathy for outcast London to be felt at a distance rather than directly.  This form of sympathy “by proxy” caused the belief that suffering should also be remedied by the State.  Spencer believed that this sympathy-at-a-distance spurred the State to expand and act on our behalf, obviating the need for direct action and stifling the Lamarckian evolution of each person’s sympathy.  Lamarckism, freedom, danger and individual sympathy went together.

Jim  Endersby

Cambridge University ( jje21@cam.ac.uk )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Sense and Stability: What the "Species Question" Wasn't for Victorian Naturalists

Historians of nineteenth century natural history have long emphasized the centrality of the species question, focusing on the issue of transmutation (evolution) as the key to understanding the shifts in the scientific and wider culture of the period. This paper argues that for most naturalists the species question was: how many species are there? Counting them was the key to mapping their distribution and it required a stable classification and nomenclature; achieving this stability was the crucial problem that preoccupied metropolitan naturalists. Transmutation was a somewhat subsidiary issue, potentially even a threat to the long-sought stability, which explains why Joseph Dalton Hooker - despite being one of Darwin’s closest friends and foremost supporters – was also wary of some of the implications of his friend’s theory. By looking at species through the eyes of working taxonomists like Hooker, instead of through the distorting prism of Darwinism, we get a very different picture of the culture of Victorian natural history and its philosophical concerns.

Paul  Erickson

University of Wisconsin - Madison ( pherickson@wisc.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Reconversion and Reinterpretation: Operations Research (OR) and Game Theory, 1944-1957

Postwar reconversion in the U.S. was not simply a matter of industry and economics; it posed intellectual challenges as well.  As operations researchers – mostly physicists and mathematicians employed by the armed forces to tackle diverse practical battlefield problems – returned from their wartime service, they sought to build a coherent disciplinary identity that would serve them well in the postwar environment.  In this context, they turned to a new and ambitious theory of economic rationality that they felt exemplified the power and promise of OR: game theory.  Game theory had been launched in a 1944 book by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern, who hoped that it would revolutionize economics.  This message was largely lost on its the economics community of the time; by contrast, operations researchers found game theory enormously appealing in their attempts to create a unique mathematical content and intellectual identity for OR.   Yet at the same time, operations researchers substantially reinterpreted the theory in response to their particular intellectual, institutional, and disciplinary imperatives.  This paper will explore how operations researchers reworked game theory in light of at least two distinct visions of rationality that arose from the practical problems addressed by OR.  The first imagined rationality as the totalizing optimization of organizational structures and resource allocation, and was often associated with the language of “planning” or “programming.”  The second saw rationality in terms of optimal individual decision-making, information processing, and cognition.  Here, I will focus on the work of John von Neumann and George Dantzig connecting game theory and linear programming, and experimental studies of game-playing and decision-making behavior performed by Merrill Flood.  Comparing the trajectories of these research programs illustrates the transformative influence of OR on game theory; in addition, by noting the ultimate destinations of these research programs in economics and psychology respectively, it is possible to glimpse the very different ways in which OR could shape postwar science. 

James   Evans

University of Puget Sound ( jcevans@ups.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Models and Nature in Ancient Greek Astronomy

Sphairopoiïa, or "sphere-making" was the art of building models of the cosmos, such as celestial globes, armillary spheres and orreries. Here we have nature modeled in the most literal sense of the word. In another, and more modern sense, the phenomena of planetary motion were modeled by theories' whether geometrical or arithmetical. Geminos, a Greek astronomer and mathematician of the first century B.C., provides one the most detailed discussions of the genres of Greek mathematical writing, and helps us to situate celestial model making among the other mathematical arts. In another work, Geminos, jumping off from earlier discussions by Aristotle and Poseidonios, made a famous distinction between the methods of the astronomer and of the student of nature, which has much to teach us about how the Greeks regarded planetary models. Finally, in his Introduction to the Phenomena, Geminos showed surprising flexibility and opportunism, passing from "realistic" representations of nature to arithmetic models borrowed from the Babylonians. This paper will address the meanings and uses of models in Greek astronomical thinking, using Geminos as guide and chief example._

Kevin  Francis

Evergreen State College ( francisk@evergreen.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

A Radical Solution to the Extinction Problem: Lamarckian Explanations for Species Disappearance, 1870-1930

In the late 19th century, Lamarckian naturalists offered a viable alternative to natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism. However, they had a harder time explaining species extinction. It was easier to understand extinction as a result of intense competition between species than as an outcome of inheriting acquired characters. To explain the disappearance of species over the course of earth history, Lamarckian evolutionists emphasized internal causes rather than environmental pressures. The invertebrate paleontologist Alpheus Hyatt proposed that species, like individuals, have a characteristic life history with identifiable traits at each stage of life. The vertebrate paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope argued that evolutionary momentum toward extreme specialization caused the demise of species. In this paper I examine the origin of such extinction theories and their continuing popularity into the twentieth century, especially among North American paleontologists. A combination of scientific, theological, and social concerns account for the persistent appeal of these explanations. Scientifically, internal causes of extinction could explain the simultaneous extinction of species with vast geographical distributions, including places where environmental conditions would seem to have improved the likelihood of species survival. Theologically, internal causes of extinction suggested an order to the appearance and disappearance of species that was missing from the chance appearance of variation at the heart of Darwinian natural selection. Socially, internal causes of extinction explained the disappearance of indigenous groups as part of the natural order, thus minimizing the role of exploitation or extermination by European colonizers.

Dana A Freiburger

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( dafreiburger@wisc.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Traces of Gold: Science and Scientific Instruments at Santa Clara College, California, 1851-1878

My paper considers the motivations of Santa Clara College in California in acquiring a large collection of scientific instruments that resulted in a surprising degree of scientific strength at this mid-nineteenth-century Jesuit institution.  The inclusion of Catholics at this time and place adds productively to our understanding and appreciation of religion and science in Antebellum American colleges.

Olival  Freire Jr.

Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil & Dibner Institute, MIT ( freirejr@ufba.br )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Commuting Between Brazil and the United States: The Case of Brazilian Physicists (1945 – 1980)

Soon after the Second World War a number of Brazilian physicists came to the United States to complete their training in physics (e.g. J. Leite Lopes, J. Tiomno, H. Carvalho, and S. Porto), or to carry out research, as was the case of C. Lattes. At the beginning they were not interested in staying in the U.S. on a permanent basis but, beginning in the early 1960s, there were changes and a certain number of them migrated to the United States. These physicists should be considered part of the Brazilian version of the brain drain, a social phenomenon particularly acute in the 1960s. Around 1970, Brazilian public policies, supported by the high rates of economic development, reversed this flow, at least partially. However, the same military dictatorship that_successfully used public policies to bring back to Brazil scientific leaders who were working abroad managed to drive away part of the Brazilian leadership in physics, and delayed or prevented the return of some others. The Brazilian brain drain was not the most severe in Latin America, since Colombia and Argentina at the time showed more dramatic numbers, but the interest in this case comes from its partial achievements in reversing brain drain. This paper compares biographical sketches of these physicists, placing them in their respective contexts. It concludes by arguing that this case study suggests that there are at least three conditions for successful reversal of a brain drain: economic development, public policies to support research, and civil liberties.

John  P Friesen

Independent Scholar ( phljpf@hotmail.com )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Hutchinsonianism and the Newtonian Enlightenment

The writings of the anti-Newtonian John Hutchinson and his followers have received considerable attention from historians of science. Hutchinson's biblically based cosmos was championed in the late eighteenth century by followers like William Jones and George Horne, men who believed that revealed religion was under threat from the popular Newtonianism promoted in public lectures. Hutchinsonianism has been intimately associated with anti-Newtonianism. However, a closer reading of Jones and Horne reveals an attempt to integrate and harmonize Newton's thought with that of Hutchinson. In their opinion, Newton was not an exponent of the materialism and anti-Trinitarianism and some of his early disciples such as William Whiston and Samuel Clarke. Any association of Hutchinsonianism with anti- Newtonianism is thus highly problematic. Instead, it is better to view the Hutchinsonians as opposed to a particular interpretation of Newton, one that supported religious heterodoxy and political radicalism.

Michael D. Friesen

University of Colorado ( mikef@mc.net )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Sculpture in Service of Science:

 The Work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in Forging Trans-Atlantic Popularization of Paleontology

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who made his reputation as a sculptor and naturalist in Britain during the 1840s-60s, came to the United States in 1868 and began a career there in lecturing, sculpting, and reconstruction of dinosaur skeletons.  Circulating among the major American scientific figures of the day, Hawkins' career provides a window into the parameters of trans-Atlantic scientific exchange after the American Civil War.  His work captured the public imagination in the United States, as it had at the Crystal Palace Park near London in 1854.  Hawkins' work demonstrated important symbioses between the worlds of art and natural history and also between popular audiences and the scientific community.  He situated himself as the major conduit of British paleontologic ideas through his association with Louis Agassiz' Anderson School of Natural History, a proposed Paleozoic Museum that was part of the development of New York City's Central Park, and skeleton reconstructions done at the Smithsonian, Princeton, and Philadelphia.

Aileen  Fyfe

National University of Ireland - Galway ( aileen.fyfe@nuigalway.ie )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Handbooks for Natural History and Travel in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

This paper examines the genre of the handbook, using it to analyze the connections between the rise of domestic travel and tourism in mid- and late nineteenth century Britain, and the writing of popular accounts of natural history.  The term ‘handbook’ was first used in English specifically for travel handbooks, an intriguing genre offering instructions not just on how to get to particular places, but on what to see and how to see it.  The several new series of handbooks for the British isles which appeared around 1850 (particularly the series from publisher John Murray) often made a point of including information and advice about seeing flora, fauna, geology and local industry – as well as architecture and art collections.  This form of writing assumed that its readers would be able to visit locations for themselves, and see the features or species mentioned – in contrast to older forms of writing about the sciences which typically assumed a reader in a private, indoors location.  It seems far from coincidental that popular natural history writers of the 1850s picked up on these developments in travel writing, and began to produce introductory works structured as travelogues (e.g. Philip Gosse), and also works designed to help the traveler observe while in the field (e.g. Gosse and J. G. Wood).  Rather than primarily telling readers about the natural world, these newer books encouraged readers to go into the natural world, and taught them to observe for themselves.

Jean-Paul   Gaudilliere

 ( gaudilli@vjf.cnrs.fr )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Regulating or Not Regulating? Diethylstilbestrol, Expert Knowledge and Therapeutic Dangers.  A Fifty Years Trajectory.

In December 2004, the patient association DES-France, which gathers the daughters and sons of women treated with DES currently affected with increased risk of cancer and reproductive abnormalities, won its first trial against a pharmaceutical firm. Following the trial UCB Pharma , which had sold diethylstilbestrol in the country until its the ban in 1977, had to pay more than 300.000 euros to the family of the patient who had initiated the suit. This judicial event is just the most recent development associated with the various DES affairs, which have surfaced during the past two decades in the United States and in Europe. What was remarkable in this recent trial was the part played by historical evidence. Building on their own inquiries and scholarly studies, the lawyers defending the DES victims argued that the dangers of the molecule had been known since the 1930s, that its efficiency had never been proved. In addition, public health authorities should not have tolerated indications like spontaneous abort. This is not retrospective knowledge. The adverse effects of DES, first of all particularly the possibility that it would trigger cancer, have actually been discussed since the chemical was synthesized and put on the market in 1936. The dangers associated with the medical uses of DES were however thought, analyzed, and controlled on a pharmacological basis, i.e. by means of animal modeling, dose-response analysis, dosage standardization, and professional regulation. When DES was gradually taken out of the markets in the 1970s, another framing had emerged, focusing on risk assessment, clinical trials, state regulation, and patient activism. Focusing on this trajectory of DES, the paper will discuss the changing management of drug adverse effects during the second half of the 20th century, emphasizing the different “ways of regulating” prevailing in France, Germany, and the United States.

Clayton A. Gearhart

St. John's University (Minnesota) ( cgearhart@csbsju.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

The Rotational Specific Heat of Molecular Hydrogen in the Old Quantum Theory

Astonishing successes and "bitter disappointment":  Thus did the German physicist Fritz Reiche portray the state of quantum theory in his 1921 text. His words apply in miniature to early descriptions of the fall in the specific heat of hydrogen gas at low temperatures"among the first systems studied in the old quantum theory.  The earliest measurements were made in 1912 by Arnold Eucken in Walther Nernst's laboratory in Berlin. The possibility of applying a theory of quantized rotators to diatomic gases was raised even earlier by Nernst, and figured in the discussions at the first Solvay conference in 1911.  Eucken's experiment was the first of many.  Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, Edwin C. Kemble, John Van Vleck, and Erwin Schrödinger, among others, attempted theoretical descriptions of the rotational specific heat, as did Reiche himself in a widely cited 1919 paper.  Despite these efforts, the problem proved intractable" its explanation involves identical particles in ways unsuspected before modern quantum mechanics.  To make matters worse, the same theory worked fairly well to describe infrared spectra of diatomic molecules such as HCl"and in the process, made the specific heat measurements even more puzzling.  I will sketch the history of this intriguing problem in early quantum theory.

Aaron Kenneth Gillette

George Mason University ( ibycusreggio@yahoo.com )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Agostino Gemelli and the Latin Eugenics Movement

This paper will discuss the involvement of Agostino Gemelli in the formation of the Latin eugenics movement.  As a young student, Gemelli was a rising star in the Italian scientific profession, but had a “conversion experience” as a young man and joined the Franciscan brotherhood.  Thereafter, he sought to harmonize science and religion through his work in experimental and applied psychology.  He also founded the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan in 1921. _Consonant with the work of some other seemingly humanitarian scientists of the time, Gemelli interested himself in eugenics.  Gemelli argued that the Catholic Church was not opposed to eugenics per se, only to the use of aggressive force to solve eugenic problems.  When eugenics did not violate “the natural laws of motherhood,” when it used methods of persuasion to form a eugenic conscience in the home and to prevent genetically or racially “disgraceful” unions, then eugenics was permissible within a Catholic society.  Though this formula seems to severely curtail the concept of eugenics as understood by many Americans at the time, it was perfectly consonant with the rising “Latin” eugenics movement in those countries with a Latin and Catholic heritage, such as Italy._During the Fascist epoch in Italy, Gemelli worked with Corrado Gini and Nicola Pende to strengthen Latin eugenics in opposition to the much more radical American and Nazi eugenic movements.  Gemelli and his colleagues objected to the presumption of Aryan racial superiority, the practice of sterilization, and the extreme hereditarianism of radical (or “mainstream”) American and Nazi eugenics.  This lead to the formation of the International Federation of Latin Eugenics Organizations in the mid-1930s, of which Gemelli was a prominent leader.  _As Mussolini turned towards an alliance with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, and embraced a more “Aryan” racial identity for Italians, Gemelli worked to protect his now disgraced Latin eugenicist allies.  Because of Mussolini’s withdrawal of support, the cataclysm of World War II, and other reasons, the Latin eugenics movement would collapse in the 1940s.  Nevertheless, Italy did not experience the definitive reaction against eugenics after World War II, as occurred in the United States and Germany.  Gemelli’s own reputation would emerge from the fascist period unscathed.  Indeed, his efforts to found a medical university in Rome, near the final years of his life in the late 1950s, would lead to the formation of the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital, which is now the primary medical facility used by Pope John Paul II._

Graeme J.N. Gooday

University of Leeds ( g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Uncertain Identities in Electricity: Experts, Franklin’s Fluid and the Electric Fairy

“What is electricity?” asked many prospective consumers of this strange intangible agency in the 1890s. The question uncomfortably revealed experts’ inability to match chemists’ definitive analysis of the rival illuminant, gas. When pressed by the laity, engineers categorized electricity as a form of energy; school teachers treated it as two fluids; a few advocated Benjamin Franklin's archaic one fluid theory, while Maxwellians dismissed the question as rendered obsolete by  ether theory. Yet the principal US Maxwellian, Professor John Trowbridge of Harvard, lectured widely on this question, meeting popular demand with What is electricity? (1896). For Trowbridge, Franklin’s fluid was as discredited as its Enlightenment counterparts: caloric and phlogiston. By contrast the UK Maxwellian Oliver Lodge advocated Franklin’s fluid as a pragmatic answer for popular and technological purposes. This was adopted by J.J.Thomson and others in Britain to popularize the corpuscle/electron theory in the 1900s, and then more extensively in the USA at Franklin's bicentenary in 1906. Although a distinctively American male identity for electricity was thereafter epitomized in Robert Millikan's textbooks and popular works, an alternative metaphorical account of electricity as a magical and dutiful female servant permeated the commercial iconography of the electrical industry, notably GEC. This paper thus illustrates how popular cultures of consumption problematized the authority of electrical experts and prompted thereby the construction of rival (gendered) identities for electricity.

Matthew  Goodrum

Virginia Tech. ( mgoodrum@vt.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Atomism, the Mechanical Philosophy, and Naturalistic Theories of  Human Origins in the Seventeenth Century

The belief in the supernatural origin of the first living things, and especially of the first humans, was almost never challenged before the seventeenth century.  While the spontaneous generation of some simple organisms had been discussed since antiquity very few natural philosophers suggested that all organsisms, including humans, could have arisen through natural processes.  Atomists were a prominent exception, and with the resurgence of interest in atomism in the seventeenth century the question of whether the first animals and humans could have been produced through spontaneous generation once again appeared.  This paper will examine how problems and ideas originating in seventeenth-century atomism, the Mechanical Philosophy, and the tradition of the Theories of the Earth all combined to create an interest in and a strong reaction against the notion of a natural origin of the first  humans.

Melinda  Brooke Gormley

Oregon State University ( gormleym@onid.orst.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

The American-Soviet Science Society, 1943-1948

The American-Soviet Science Society started in 1943 as one of many specialty panels developed by a parent group, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. The American-Soviet Science Society, under the direction of geneticist L.C. Dunn of Columbia University, aimed to improve relations between the United States and Soviet Union through the exchange of scientists and scientific information. In 1946 the Science Society attempted to dissociate itself from the Friendship Council, an organization that the House Un-American Activities Committee deemed a communist front group. The Science Society was never put on an official list, but it suffered nonetheless. The main accusations against the American-Soviet Science Society came from House Un-American Activities Committee during their 1947 investigation of physicist E.U. Condon, a member of the American-Soviet Science Society’s Executive Committee. Dunn and the other members, including astronomer Harlow Shapley of Harvard University and pathologist Leo Loeb of Washington University, wrote an article in 1948 announcing that the Science Society was forced to disband and protesting the government’s involvement in the Society’s end. A history of the American-Soviet Science Society demonstrates a crisis developing in the United States between scientists upholding traditional views of science based on internationalism, and a government establishing new rules based on military procedures and confidentiality. It is also a unique mode for examining the relationship between science and early cold war politics.

Edward   Gray

Florida State University  ( egray@mailer.fsu.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - J

The Trials of John Ledyard, Client Traveler

There is no shortage of famous travelers in early American history: the Bartrams, Jonathan Carver, Madam Sarah Knight, John Lawson and others. All of these people wrote with a detached, objective eye about the social and natural worlds before them and all of them did so with an eye toward contributing to that familiar eighteenth-century thing called "useful knowledge." The same was true of another, now less well-known traveler, John Ledyard. Unlike all of these other figures, though, Ledyard traveled as a profession. His well-being, his reputation, his entire existence came to depend on his ability to translate distant experience into accessible information. This cannot be said of any of these other travelers and can be said about few others in the late eighteenth-century world in which Ledyard lived. This paper will argue that Ledyard's story, particularly the strange and ultimately fatal bonds between him and his patrons, illuminates the little studied social underbelly of scientific travel in the era of the American and French Revolutions._

Elizabeth   Green Musselman

Southwestern University ( greenmue@southwestern.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Folk Classification: How Cultures Categorized Nature in Colonial South Africa

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, naturalists commonly took it as part of their charge to collect local names of and knowledge about their specimens. If naturalists from Linnaeus and La Condamine to the scrappiest collector took this charge seriously, then so should we as historians. The Cape Colony in southern Africa acted as a vital crossroads between multiple African, European, and Asian cultures. This paper will resurrect and compare various scholarly and folk classification systems that different Cape cultures used to understand nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. While the Cape is a promising laboratory for comparing classificatory systems, the historian faces the challenge that none of the original southern African societies had written languages. Therefore, part of my paper will explore the possibilities that ethnoscientific and ethnolinguistic techniques offer to historians of non-western science.

Alison  Griffiths

The City University of New York, Baruch College ( alison_griffiths@baruch.cuny.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

'Mechanical Aids to Learning':   Film and Multi-Media in the Museum

This talk constructs a genealogy of audio-visual techniques in museums, tracing contemporary uses of video screens and computer interactives to their technological predecessors, including the gramophone, radio, and 16mm film.  How the use of these technologies responded to the logistical and discursive agendas of the early twentieth century museum is taken up here, with the focus less on how film programs per se were established in museums, than on how the protocols of film spectatorship were uniquely challenged and adapted for the heterotopic public gallery.  Issues explored include the ways in which curators anticipated and responded to ambulatory modes of film spectatorship commonplace in museums, the strategies they employed to mitigate (or accommodate) the distracted gaze of the spectator, and an appreciation of how the conventions of non-fiction film exhibition and reception were destabilized in the museum as a result of an aleatory glance and highly mobile spectator.  The talk concludes by grounding these issues in a case study examination of the contemporary “African Voices” exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, a hi-tech installation heavily influenced by a broadly postmodern shift in museum curatorship and gallery design.  My interest here is in how so-called “augmented reality devices” (including interactive touch-screen kiosks, video monitors, and digital audio guides), affect the very nature of the museum experience while paradoxically constructing a sense of déjà vu with regards to their low-tech predecessors.

Susan Marie Groppi

University of California at Berkeley ( groppi@socrates.berkeley.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

The Ladylike Science: Psychology in American Women's Colleges, 1880-1915

The development of scientific psychology in the United States prior to the First World War was profoundly influenced by a number of intersecting social and cultural factors. One of the most important of these was the fundamental and multifaceted restructuring of the American higher educational system: a shift from the ideals of the liberal arts college to those of the scientific research university, the emergence of women's colleges as an important site for new disciplines, the expansion of access to higher education through the effects of the Morrill Act and the general growth of public universities, and the incorporation of new instructional philosophies and strategies in the normal schools and teachers' colleges.  This paper explores the relationship between scientific psychology and the institutional influence of the women's colleges, focusing primarily on Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar.  At the end of the nineteenth century, American women's colleges were grappling with issues related to not only women's education but also to the changing roles played by women in American society.  An examination of the nature of psychology instruction at these colleges can be used to illuminate both these questions of a woman's place in society and psychology's place among the sciences.

Piers J. Hale

Colby College ( pjhale@interchange.ubc.ca )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

George Bernard Shaw, Creative Evolution, and Shavian Eugenics

George Bernard Shaw is well known for his adherence to Lamarckism long after Weismann had exploded the inheritance of acquired characters as a viable evolutionary mechanism.  A “Creative Evolutionist”, Shaw believed that a progressive “Life Force” drove and directed the development of all life on earth.  Like Henri Bergson and Samuel Butler who advocated similar vitalist theories, Shaw rejected the materialism, determinism and purposelessness that he perceived to be at the heart of Darwinian “circumstantial selection”.  Lamarckism, on the other hand, seemingly promised human agency and socialism.  However, in this paper I argue that for all its promise of agency and emancipation, Shavian Lamarckism actually endorsed the most disturbing eugenic conclusions. Under the irresistible persistence of Creative Evolution humanity became little more than raw materials for “mistake after mistake” in a “method of Trial and Error” in pursuit of progress and perfection.  Ultimately human life was subordinate to the all consuming “evolutionary appetite” of the Life Force.

Nancy S. Hall

University of Delaware ( nhall@udel.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

The Sceptic and the Psychics - Ronald Fisher and His Statistical Advice to the Society for Psychical Research

Ronald A. Fisher, well known in both statistics and genetics, was emphatically not a believer in parapsychology. He was, however, immensely fascinated by any and all mathematical problems and puzzles. For more than twenty years, Fisher gave informal advice to the Society for Psychical Research, on how to evaluate some of their experiments. Founded in 1882 and headquartered in London, the Society had the continuing problem of deciding if experimental results in telepathy and clairvoyance were meaningful or only due to chance. Fisher focused initially on the mathematics of card guessing, and in the 1920’s he published three papers in the journals of the Society, on how to evaluate and weight the various possible results. He also advised on many ongoing experiments. In one memorable episode involving two hundred respondents and more than 6000 results of card guessing (where the results were already suspect because of the unregulated structure of the experiment), Fisher was able to use the requirement of randomization to demonstrate that the results could not be trusted. Surprisingly, it was the reported results that lacked the expected random quality. (Three years later, the experiment was carried out again, restructured. The Society’s journal article reporting it was titled “Report of a Series of Experiments Clairvoyance at a Distance in Approximately Fraud-Proof Conditions.” The results were considered valid but did not demonstrate clairvoyance.)There was extensive correspondence between Fisher and members of the Society, lasting many years, about various mathematical aspects of their efforts. Additionally he was acknowledged and thanked for his statistical guidance by a number of the Society’s other authors. Somewhat to his consternation, after several years Fisher was elected an honorary member of the Society for Psychical Research.

Ki Won  Han

University of California, Berkeley ( hkw9642@berkeley.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

From Biology to Oceanography: T. Wayland Vaughan and the Transformation of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Geologist T. Wayland Vaughan became the second director of the Scripps Institution in 1924. Founded in 1903 as a marine biological station of the University of California’s zoology department, the institution was still called the Scripps Institution for Biological Research when Vaughan came to California. This paper aims to show how oceanography became an independent scientific discipline by exploring Vaughan’s idea of oceanography and how he succeeded in transforming the biological station into the first oceanographic institution in the United States. The decision to make the institution oceanographic, and also to change its name to “The Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” was already made by William E. Ritter, the founding director of Scripps, and the Regents of the University of California even before Vaughan was considered candidate for the directorship. Therefore Vaughan himself was not responsible for the change of the institution’s long-term direction but was chosen as a man who would carry out the actual task of making it into the first American oceanographic institution. What Vaughan encountered in La Jolla in 1924 was a seaside biological station whose staff was constituted entirely of biologists except for one physical oceanographer whose main role was to assist marine biological studies of other researchers. With his firm belief that oceanography had to be an earth science field in which physical, chemical, and geological aspects of the sea were studied in balance with biological, he tried to build other branches of oceanography as strong as marine biology at Scripps. At the same time, he tried to diminish the influence from the zoology department at Berkeley by drawing several professors from other departments into the scientific and administrative affairs of the institution. By successfully establishing the new scientific discipline at Scripps, and also at the university, he proved himself to be the right person for the Scripps Institution at that time. Vaughan’s influence was not confined to the University of California, however, since he was a leader of the American oceanographic community who, mainly through his active participation in the Committee on Oceanography of the National Academy of Sciences, contributed to the shaping of early American oceanography. Oceanography, as it has been practiced in the United States, therefore, certainly reflects Vaughan’s vision.

Steven J. Harris

Harvard University Extension School ( sjharris@fas.harvard.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

Messengers of God, Merchants of Nature: Jesuit Scientiae Commercium and the Overseas Missions

The patterns of “imports” and “exports” of natural knowledge by French Jesuit missionaries working in Canada and China in the latter half of the 17th century are, as one might expect, strikingly different and reflect the profound differences between Chinese and Algonquian cultures. Yet the sort of natural knowledge Jesuits brought into these remote theaters and the means by which they appropriated the natural knowledge held by indigenes are strikingly similar. By thinking spatially about Bourdieu’s notion of “field”, I will examine how Jesuits learned to play a double-ended game of cultural production, one rooted in their intimacy with foreign cultures and the other in their European-based “apostolate of the press”.

Tofigh  Heidarzadeh

OKLAHOMA UNIVERSITY, NORMAN ( theidar@gmail.com )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - I

The Physics of Comets in Newton’s Works

Although the key role of comets in construction of the Newtonian grand picture of the universe has been discussed in several studies, the relationship between the cosmological role of comets and their physical properties has not been adequately considered. Since, according to Newton, a universe without comets will be dynamically and chemically unstable, it is crucial to see if this vital role of comets is consistent with the physical properties of comets, as Newton describes them. In this paper Newton’s published writings about the comets will be examined to see if he was successful in producing a consistent physics of comets compatible with the cosmological role he attributed to them.

Kathy  Hermes

Central Connecticut State University ( hermesk@ccsu.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - J

American Indians in the Pacific: How Captain Cook Understood Polynesia

The explorations of Captain Cook are currently a hotly debated subject by historians and anthropologists. His role as a captain, his treatment of native peoples, and his importance to global trends of the present are subjects of scrutiny. As with the study of Native Americans generally, the historiography about Cook and the Polynesians has become less about the invasive character of imperialism and more about the encounters and exchanges between two peoples. Almost nothing has been written on Cook’s northeastern North American experience. Only his voyage to Alaska is deemed important historically and scientifically, because it was part of one of the post-Endeavour explorations. His pre-Endeavour travels, exposures to native peoples, and mapping of the northeastern coastline are rarely discussed in depth. This paper will examine the way in which Captain Cook took ideas about native peoples and their culture from his experience in eastern North America during the French and Indian War and applied them to his explorations of the Pacific Ocean. I will argue that Cook’s knowledge of Native America, while not deep, influenced his attitudes towards other native peoples by serving as a basis of comparison. Cook frequently fell back on his concept of Indians of the American east coast whenever he lacked particular understanding of a group of people. His equation of native peoples with Indians has had a longstanding impact upon both historians and anthropologists, who have likewise tended to repeat the existence of “commonalities” between native peoples that Cook first identified

Rebekah  Higgitt

Imperial College London ( rebekah.higgitt@imperial.ac.uk )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Exploded Systems: Views of Alchemy in 19th-Century Biographies and Histories of Science 

Early in the 19th century, two distinct views of alchemy were articulated in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While one fictional professor dismissed alchemical literature as “exploded systems and useless names”, another thought that the authors of these texts “were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge”. In addition to these contrasting opinions, more hostile views are suggested by contemporary men of science like David Brewster, who found it difficult to accept that scientific heroes like Isaac Newton, Tycho Brahe and Robert Boyle had spent significant time and effort in pursuing alchemical studies. In this paper I will discuss depictions of alchemy in 19th-century histories of science and biographies of known alchemists. I will explore which of these very different views was adopted by the authors – who typically were men of science – and provide some preliminary answers to the question of whether attitudes to alchemy were determined by factors such as educational background, disciplinary or institutional ties and religious views. I will also suggest that, in the latter part of the century, when chemistry was gaining in confidence as a successful, professionalised discipline, attitudes to alchemy were typically more positive among men of science than they had been earlier in the century

Mark  L. Hineline

 ( hineline@helix.ucsd.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Life Chances: A Prosopographical Study of the First Generation of Ph.D.s Trained in American Universities

The first cohort of scientists trained in doctoral programs in the United States began receiving Ph.D's in the early 1880s. While some would lead extraordinary lives in science, the fortunes of others proved, at best, mercurial. In this paper, I examine the life chances of this first cohort, the strategies they employed to secure investments they had made in their educations and early careers, and the beginnings of social stratification within and between scientific disciplines in colleges and universities in the United States. Of particular interest in this study is the problem of center and periphery in American science, and the efforts made by newly trained scientists to sustain connections to emerging geographical centers even as they entered employment in locations that left them isolated from their peers. One such strategy involved the burst in the creation of disciplinary institutions and associations that occurred in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Jonathan  Hodge

University of Leeds ( M.J.S.Hodge@leeds.ac.uk )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

On the Complex Historical and Conceptual Relations between (1) Fisher and Wright's Original Disagreements about Evolution and (2) Later Decades of Controversy Over Selection and Drift

For Fisher, the synopses say and not too misleadingly, evolution goes best when a species is large in numbers (subject therefore to no significant random drift), mating randomly and subject to uniform slight selection pressures across the whole population; while for Wright it does so when the species comprises small local populations that are almost completely isolated from one another, and subject to intra-populational drift and inbreeding (both due to the small numbers) and  intra- and  inter-populational selection. So, perhaps then, the Fisher /Wright controversy, originally and ever since, was ultimately about the relative importance (R I) or significance of different factors, most obviously drift and selection, as causes of evolutionary change. My paper seeks to go beyond this familiar R I historiography, not merely by asking how such R I divergences about answers arose in the first place, but why, much more fundamentally, Fisher and Wright diverged over what the decisive problems were. For example, while Wright’s 1932 paper has small subpopulations mainly in order to have drift offsetting the limitations of selection, his 1931 paper does so mainly to have inbreeding offsetting the crucial disadvantage (meiosis breaking up good gene combinations) of the exclusively sexual reproduction in higher organisms. Indeed (although I have never seen this fully recognised by any historian) that whole 1931 paper is explicitly aimed, as the 1932 paper is not, at developing a theory, later called the shifting balance theory, as to how these higher organisms can evolve optimally despite that disadvantage. By contrast, Fisher’s deepest assumptions about the inherent optimality of relations between sexual reproduction and natural selection ensured that this was a problem that could never even arise for him. Concentrating on the resuppositional sources of such problem differences can lead us beyond the narrow confines of any RI historiography for the complex connections between (1) Fisher and Wright’s original disagreements and (2) the decades of later controversies over drift and selection.

Sungook  Hong

Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Seoul National University, Korea ( comenius@snu.ac.kr )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

'Nuclear Blessings': Images of Nuclear Energy in Korea during the 1950s and 1960s

When the Korean War ended in 1953, the infrastructure for scientific research in South Korea was virtually non-existent. In this dismal period, nuclear science led the way. In 1958, legislation for promoting nuclear power was passed. The Atomic Energy Laboratory was built in 1959, and the first nuclear reactor for research (TRIGA-Mark II), imported from the United States, was put into operation at the same time. Scientists, as well as politicians, had a high hope that atomic energy would transform South Korea into a richer and stronger nation than before. They, therefore, welcomed the introduction of the first atomic reactor enthusiastically, and encouraged and supported young scientists to study nuclear physics and engineering in the United States. Public perceptions of nuclear energy were highly optimistic as well. Newspapers and magazines celebrated the futuristic role of atomic energy for the re-building of the nation. These highly optimistic and enthusiastic reactions to nuclear energy originated from three different sources. First, some politicians (and others) who had seen Japan surrender after the nuclear bombings hoped that atomic energy might lead us to have atomic bombs, which would empower the nation. Second, atomic science and atomic energy were considered to include the very spirit and essence of modern Western science in a compressed form. Finally, Korean scientists never doubted some Western scientists' exaggerated claims on the use of atomic battery, atomic fertilizer, atomic agriculture, and atomic cities in the moon. I will show that these initial enthusiastic reactions of scientists and the public to atomic energy largely shaped the path of the Korean government's atomic policy from the 1970s on.

Florence C Hsia

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( fchsia1@attglobal.net )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

From Practice to Print: Jesuit Science in Late Imperial China and its European Diffusion

Although they worked at the very margins of European savant culture, Jesuit missionaries in late imperial China strove nonetheless to make their scientific activities known in the capitals of early modern Europe through a variety of correspondence networks and publication venues. By studying the relative success of the French and Portuguese contingents on the China mission in translating Jesuit scientific practices in the Middle Kingdom to European readerships, this paper charts the differential circulation of Jesuit scientific material from Beijing to St. Petersburg, Paris, Berlin, and London in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Minghui  Hu

University of Chicago ( mhu@uchicago.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

Uninflected Cosmos or Fluctuating Record?

Debates over Ancient Calendars and Cosmological Models in Eighteenth-century China

One of the critical results in appropriating Jesuit astronomy and mathematics for scholars in Qing China was to conciliate what the new cosmological model could retroactively calculate regarding the chronology of ancient records and the actual chronology passed on in historical records.  The distinction indicates two modes of empirical scholarship:  The first is more inclined to hold the universality and timelessness of the cosmos above the vicissitudes of historical records; while the second values the truthfulness revealed in the reconstructed records of the observable in the sky.  Since the past remained the unyielding guide to the present for Qing scholars, the wisdom and traces of ancient China should be meticulously studied as exemplars.  The key for such research is the historical chronology, as also highly cherished by Renaissance humanists in the Latin West.  The debates between these two modes of empirical scholarship not only demonstrate the continuous use of Jesuit sciences in the native contexts but also reveal the centrality of the cosmos in classical scholarship and high culture in the second half of eighteenth-century China.

J. Benjamin  Hurlbut

Harvard University ( jhurlbut@fas.harvard.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - I

Selling Knowledge:  Professor-Lobbyists, Entrepreneurs and California's Proposition 71

With the passage of Proposition 71, the state of California has committed three billion dollars over ten years to stem cell research.  The ballot measure emerged out of an increasingly public and increasingly political debate over human embryo research, one which has been especially vigorous in California.  Multiple discourses of valuation and the description of goods (economic, technological, intellectual and moral) were deployed in the months leading up to the passage of Prop 71.  The wide margin by which the proposition passed has been interpreted variously as a democratic affirmation of the value of free academic inquiry, of the right of the individual to health, of the economic value of investment in entrepreneurial science, and of the intrinsic beneficence of biomedical research.  Almost immediately following the passage of the proposition, however, controversy has arisen over the nature of these goods, as well as over their proper relationship to one another, and to the scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians and citizens with whom they are associated.  The discourse surrounding Prop 71 provides a case-study in public deliberations over the valuation of the goods of scientific research, and the institutional, material, epistemic, and personal loci in which these goods properly reside.

Julia F Irwin

Yale University ( julia.f.irwin@yale.edu )

Friday 4:00  PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

“‘What, Then, Do They Mean by Feeble-mindedness?’:

Contested Terminology in the Formation of Professional Psychology”

While the historiography of the eugenics movement has widely discussed the critiques of the movement by sociologists and geneticists, mounting dissent within the psychological community, too, threatened the stability of the discipline.  In the 1910s, the renowned eugenicist and psychologist Henry H. Goddard began to advocate a redefinition or discarding of the term “feebleminded,” advising that more exact terminology would facilitate communication among eugenicist-psychologists and would lend greater scientific authority to their writing.  From the start of Goddard’s attempts at standardization, however, disputes from prominent eugenicists discredited his claim that “feebleminded” could ever be used as an objective, meaningful term.  Goddard’s efforts to establish a more standardized disciplinary language thus failed to persuade even those with similar professional backgrounds and ambitions.  This presentation will argue that eugenicist-psychologists, engaging in what they understood to be genuine scientific discourse, contested the idea that a term already loaded with social meanings could ever be used as a quantifiable, professionally useful diagnosis.  This debate over disciplinary terminology indicated discord among psychologists’ faith in some of the scientific claims of the eugenics movement, and illustrated their concern with constructing scientifically meaningful language that would be vital to securing a legitimate professional identity.

Takashi  Ito

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science / University of Tokyo ( tito975@hotmail.com )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

'The Eden of Northern Marylebone': London's Zoological Gardens and the Metropolitan Experience in the 1830s.

This paper explores the development of London’s Zoological Gardens and their contribution to London’s ‘metropolitan’ reputation and identity. I will argue that the Zoo provided a new genre of urban space that transcribed scientific ideas about nature into the realm of urban entertainment. The Zoo was not only an essential urban amenity that linked science into people’s everyday life, but it also substantially transformed popular perceptions of London’s metropolitan landscapes. Thus the Regent’s Park Zoo sets the stage for an investigation into the relations between science, entertainment, and urban experience. First opened in 1828 by the London Zoological Society, the Zoo quickly thrived as London’s premier public scientific/entertainment park by creating what could be seen as an authentic, aesthetic, and fashionable form of animal exhibition. The Zoo was successful because of its location in Regent’s Park, which was the attractive residential and exhibition quarter of the metropolis. In the course of large-scale urban regeneration in the 1830s, the Zoo established itself as an integral part of ‘Modern Rome’, and was celebrated as ‘a venue of social pleasures’, where people assembled in throngs to enjoy the spectacle of exotic wildlife.

Margaret C. Jacob

 ( mjacob@history.ucla.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Steam and Wool in Leeds: The Application of Mechanical Knowledge in Civic Life and Shop Floor”

We do not think of wool manufacturers as leaders in steam, or as possessing sophisticated mechanical knowledge. But beginning in the 1790's the woolen cloth manufacturing firm of Benjamin Gott employed steam engines in their factory. Indeed they used the engines and other hydraulic presses with a degree of sophistication that made them leaders in the application of mechanical knowledge in the region. But knowledge on the shop floor translated into civic capital. The paper explores the uses to which Gott's knowledge base was put on shop floor and in civic live and relies on archival work resently completed in Leeds.

Michel  Janssen

University of Minnesota ( janss011@tc.umn.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

The Dawn of Quantum Mechanics in Minnesota

Given the tremendous amount of work done on spectroscopy in the context of the old quantum theory of Bohr and Sommerfeld, it is somewhat ironic _that the classically much better understood phenomenon of dispersion turned out to be key to the breakthrough to matrix mechanics. Heisenberg's theory grew out of a celebrated paper on dispersion by Kramers, who as a courtesy listed Heisenberg as his co-author. A much clearer paper covering much the same terrain was written around the same time by John van Vleck working in virtual isolation at the University of Minnesota. In my talk, based on an ongoing collaboration with theoretical physicist Tony Duncan at the University of Pittsburgh and drawing heavily on the superior treatment of dispersion by Van _Vleck, I analyze the importance of dispersion theory and of the philosophy of the infamous Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory invoked by various practitioners for the transition from the old quantum theory to matrix mechanics.

Scott  Johnson

Harvard University ( sfjohns@fas.harvard.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

John Bainbridge, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford: Greek, Syriac, and Arabic texts Post-Copernicus

It is well known that the once labeled “Copernican revolution” was in certain parts of Europe much less a revolution than a slow adoption of Copernican astronomy into the dominant, revered Ptolemaic system. This was still true of Oxford in the early seventeenth century, when Sir Henry Savile (1549–1622), Warden of Merton college and sometime lecturer in astronomy and mathematics, founded two chairs of mathematics for the university, one of which was to be solely devoted to the teaching of theoretical astronomy. The first Savilian Professor of Astronomy was John Bainbridge (1582–1643), a physician from London who had published only one book on astronomy at the time of his appointment in 1620. Concurrently with the appointment Bainbridge published in London a new edition and Latin translation of two Greek works which Savile had already formally prescribed to be taught by the new Professor. These texts were the Pseudo-Proclan Sphaera (actually a selection from Geminus, c. AD 50) and Ptolemy’s Hypotheses Planetarum. (The edition was made from manuscripts Savile himself bought during his grand tour of Europe in 1578–82.) The present paper explores the history of this edition-translation in the context, first, of Bainbridge’s appointment and, second, of his documented search for Syriac and Arabic manuscripts. In a 1636 letter to James Ussher, Bainbridge specifically asks for both Syriac and Arabic manuscripts, for the purpose of “not being hoodwinked” by those who know the languages better. Thus, his interest in both Greek and these eastern languages seems fueled by a desire to translate the original texts for himself. Crucial to this argument is the fact that the Sphaera of Proclus/Geminus had already been printed and translated numerous times in the sixteenth century, making Bainbridge’s edition and translation (the last one into Latin) apparently superfluous. Finally, after his death in 1643, his successor John Greaves (also a noted Arabist) published Bainbridge’s Canicularia (1648), a refutation (based on eastern sources) of Joseph Scaliger’s description of the Julian calendar. (The publication of the Canicularia was also supported by James Ussher and Edward Pococke, professor of Arabic at Oxford.) These various facets of John Bainbridge’s professorship—the intellectual networks of Oxford, the collecting of eastern manuscripts, and the printing of critical editions and translations—are evidence of a sustained effort to recover the knowledge of the ancient world, in an effort to compete with the increasingly dominant Copernican model.

Susan D. Jones

University of Minnesota ( jonessu@colorado.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Bradford and Walpole:  Exchanging Knowledge About Occupational Anthrax

This study uses two British and American anthrax outbreaks of occupational anthrax to explore the farm and factory as sites of scientific knowledge production.  In the late 1860s, American physicians in Walpole, Massachusetts began reporting a dramatic increase in cases of anthrax among workers in local hair, wool and hide factories.  While their analysis confirmed British and European ideas about what they called “the natural history” of the disease, they challenged specific components of the theory that “bacteroides” caused the disease.  A decade later in Bradford, an English industrial town, physician-scientists were again confronted with animal and human outbreaks of the disease on local farms and in wool factories.  They observed the blood of victims to be filled with organisms that looked like “caterpillars without legs” and recognized the differential sporulating form of the organism's life cycle as the infective principle.  In both of these cases, the investigators depended on reading other investigators' published work, presenting work to local colleagues for discussion, and in one case coming to conclusions following the chance visit of a colleague who had recently toured other European laboratories.  Yet these exchanges often created more dissention than consensus.  Anthrax manifested itself in many forms in animals and humans; the bacteria appeared to look and behave differently at different points in the life cycle; and the investigators could not be sure that anthrax did not somehow alter its presentation once removed from the farm or factory.  Far from hindering attempts to understand the Bacillus anthracis in many of its manifestations, transnational exchanges and challenges provided the flexibility necessary to maintaining local pertinence even while supporting general theories about anthrax.303.492.2931

Daniel T Julich

University of Florida ( djulich@ufl.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Pascal and the Dynamics of the Parisian Savant Community

This paper will examine the dynamics of the Parisian scientific community in the middle of the seventeenth century through the relationships and work of Blaise Pascal.  His early inclusion within the circle of scholars that is traditionally called the “Mersenne group” offers an example of the means by which individuals attained to a kind of legitimation before the advent of formal societies.  An analysis of the fragmentary accounts of his interaction and cooperation with the likes of Desargues, Roberval, Carcavy, Mersenne, and Descartes provides the possibility for a fuller understanding of the role of personal connections in the practice of natural philosophy in the seventeenth-century.  Finally, Pascal’s relationship with savants as he grew more ambivalent toward work in physics and mathematics illustrates a negotiation of identity between two different communities – the religious one at Port-Royal and the savant one in the proto-academy.  This paper is a work in progress for an ongoing project considering Pascal from the religious, mathematical, scientific, and personal perspective.  Much of the paper’s primary material will derive from the correspondence of those who interacted with Pascal.

Edward  Jurkowitz

University of Illinois at Chicago ( jurkowit@uic.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Ernst Mach’s Perspectival Scientific Methodology and its Political-Epistemological Location at the End of the Nineteenth Century

     While often labeled a positivist, this paper will show that Ernst Mach was more accurately a pragmatist and “perspectivalist.”  After briefly showing that Mach constantly fought against the possibility that any theory would rise to predominance, the paper will indicate the liberal political grounds for Mach’s theoretical stance.  The center of the paper will then show that Mach pursued a “perspectival” methodology that cohered with his broader scientific and social epistemology: one that allowed for multiple theoretical perspectives within any given field of inquiry.  Examining Mach’s central research topics from the mid-1860s to the late 1880s, especially physical and physiological optics and acoustics, Mach will appear to have pursed, in his day-to-day practice, an anti-foundational research methodology capable of encompassing multiple theoretical perspectives.  Mach’s formal epistemology will be shown to have grown largely from this practice.  This methodology will then be located within a broader framework of methodological approaches competing in the last two decades of the 19th century.

Minsoo  Kang

 ( kangmi@umsl.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

The Man-Machine and the Automaton-Man: Ideas on Mechanized Humanity in Early Modern Thought

One of the most striking emblems of intellectual discourse in the 17th and early 18th centuries is that of a human being described and observed as a machine.  This image of the mechanical man, however, was of complicated significance as some saw in it the promise of a rational understanding of the nature of humanity itself, while others used it in reference to certain types of people who lacked the principle of freedom either through oppression or conformism.  My paper will describe both the differing views of the machine-man and the automaton-man in the period as well as the ideas and cultural attitudes behind them.

Shruti  Kapila

Tufts University ( Shruti.Kapila@tufts.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Race Matters: Science, Orientalism and the Translation of Difference

By positing a history of connections, this paper brings together late eighteenth century classical- orientalist scholarship and the emergent theories of scientific racial classification. In particular, it will show the affinity between William Jones’s Sanskrit scholarship and J. F. Blumenbach’s categorization of humanity into five racial types. While ‘type’ (linguistic or racial) prefigured these new ‘sciences’, the nineteenth century expansion and explosion of print culture in different vernaculars like Hindi, Marathi and Bengali, appropriated and mutated these understandings of human type. ‘Samudrikvigyan’ or the ‘Science of Material Differences’ became a popular genre of assessing distinction that disseminated new scientific ideas and at the same time in the very act of translation dislodged these ideas from their original and racialising meaning. [120]

Christine  Keiner

Rochester Institute of Technology ( cmkgsh@rit.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

The 1930s vs. 1990s Debates Over Introducing Non-Native Oysters to Chesapeake Bay

The Chesapeake Bay’s capacity to generate oysters has reached such a crisis point that since the late 1990s, scientists, resource officials, environmentalists, and watermen from Virginia and Maryland have debated whether to introduce a disease-resistant Asian oyster species to the bay.  Proponents argue that seeding the bay with sterile Asian oysters will revive the ailing oyster industry, whereas opponents raise the specter of ecological contamination by an unproven technology.  Although the controversy has raged for several years, few stakeholders seem aware that a similar debate took place over sixty years earlier.  During both eras, proponents presented the deliberate introduction of a non-native species as crucial to the economic recovery of an industry in rapid decline.  However, whereas opponents of the current proposal use ecological concepts to express the fear that the Asian species could drive the indigenous oyster to extinction, the opponents of the 1930s utilized the racist rhetoric of anti-immigration campaigns to argue against the incursion of “Jap” oysters.  A comparative analysis of the two historical debates highlights broader cultural attitudes in the United States about the meaning of “what is natural,” the importance of ecology, and the role of scientists in shaping public perceptions of these issues.

Michael  Kempe

Max-Planck-Institut for European Legal History ( kempe@mpier.uni-frankfurt.de )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Relics of the First World. ”Reading” Fossils in the Theories of the Deluge Around 1700

Since antiquity no other natural disaster of the Christian tradition has inspired the human imagination in art, literature and science more than the world-wide inundation, which is described by Moses in Genesis six to nine. In the seventeenth century the deluge became an object of study for the new empirical and mechanical sciences. In one of the most famous books of that time, the 'Telluris theoria sacra' from 1681, Thomas Burnet, an Anglican churchman, explained the flood in both religious and scientific terms. Burnet's 'Sacred Theory' triggered an international cosmogonical and cosmological debate that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. This debate produced countless scientific accounts of the biblical flood. One eminent contributor to this debate on the deluge was the Swiss natural scientist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672-1733). Noah's flood gave him the answer to the puzzling question of why fossil shells and mussels were found even in the highest Swiss mountains. A huge fossil of a gigantic salamander was declared by Scheuchzer as a proof of the deluge; he named it a human_eye-witness of the flood, the 'Homo diluvii testis'. In the work of Scheuchzer and others the inundation described by Moses was the key to explaining the history of the earth. In fact, the birth of “modern” geology came, so to speak, out of the waters of Noah's flood. As the main event of geology in its early period as a new science the deluge formed the paradigm of the so-called diluvialism (from the Latin word 'diluvium' for deluge). Scheuchzer's cosmology represented a world-view that was very common and widespread in the early Enlightenment. Moreover, for many natural historians in Europe Scheuchzer's interpretation of Genesis provided the right explanation to understand the history of mankind and nature. His diluvial theory was very influential in the early eighteenth century: it gave the so-called pysico-theologists their framework, by which to explain the creation and the early period of the planet as Moses had told it. In my paper I would like to show how fossils were read by the diluvialits - the theorists of the deluge - as solid sources of history. For them fossils became the key to an understanding of the history of the earth. They provided also the link between the history of mankind and the history of nature in the framework of one single worldwide disaster. Firstly, as “monuments” or “relics” of the flood fossils gave nature its past time. The petrefacts were understood as “dumb witnesses” of time older than even the oldest ancient artefacts. However, the “homo diluvii testis” gave not only nature but also mankind its history. And with the human eye-witness of Noah's flood the two histories (of mankind and_nature) were tied together; in this sense they formed both halves of the history of the earth. Moreover, the fossils reminded man of his former moral depravation and sinfulness. Thus, the fossils were not only interpreted as traces of the past in the book of nature but, at the same time, as moral verses of a natural prayerbook. In this way the relics of the flood were also understood as sermons of stone preaching from the earth' past to the present times."

Barbara A. Kimmelman

Philadelphia University ( kimmelmanb@philau.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Adapted to the Industrial Environment: Darwinism in U.S. Plant Breeding in the Early Twentieth Century

It has been argued by myself, Marga Vicedo, and others, that the Mendelian/biometrician dispute, which may well have driven a wedge between Mendelism and Darwinism in England, had no such effect in the United States, where not only did Mendelism and Darwinism co-exist peaceably together in the mind of many an American biologist. This, we have argued, amounts to an "evolutionary synthesis" different from, but no less synthetic of Mendelian and Darwinian perspectives than, the more widely recognized integration of Darwinism and population genetics of the mid-20th century.  When making this argument, I have been challenged to define more precisely what I mean by Darwinism; critics have contended that adherence to selectionism does not necessarily a Darwinian make, and I have been called upon to provide stronger evidence of a Darwinian mindset.  Here I argue, through a series of case studies of breeding projects in cotton, citrus fruits, and corn, that plant breeders not only self-consciously identified their work as Darwinian, seeing their actions and products as providing direct evidence of natural selection, but also that through the selection process they explicitly created organisms adapted to the industrial needs of American agriculture and food processing and production.  Breeders, through this process of adaptation to the environment of industrialized agriculture, combined attention to individual "Mendelizing" characters and Darwinian selection in ways that provided key insights into the relationship between Mendelian and Darwinian theory, especially in the work of Edward Murray East.

David  Kirby

University of Manchester ( david.kirby@manchester.ac.uk )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Big Screen Science: Scientists’ Backstage Role in the Production of Hollywood Films

The overwhelming financial success of films such as Jurassic Park (1993), Twister (1995) and Deep Impact (1998) has led filmmakers to believe that “realism” is a necessary component in producing a modern science-based blockbuster. “Realism” has two meanings in the context of science-based fictional films. The first relates to the state-of–the-art CGI and animatronic effects used to create scientific depictions including dinosaurs, tornadoes and comets. The second meaning follows from a perception that the filmic representations correspond to “accurate” scientific depictions. The belief that scientific verisimilitude translates into box office success has led to filmmakers’ ever increasing reliance on science consultants during production. Science consultants allow filmmakers to claim authenticity for their scientific representations in publicity material and media coverage. However, the “backstage” role of scientists in the production of these cinematic “performances of public science” is not often recognized. How much can consultants influence the images on screen? Does a significant influence “backstage’ actually lead to “accurate” images? What do the scientists take away from these backstage interactions? In this paper I use interviews with science consultants and filmmakers along with archival research to elaborate on the role science consultants play in negotiating information transfer between the scientific community and the entertainment community. While filmmakers have ultimate authority over their films, a desire for realism has increased scientists’ influence during the negotiations between consultants and filmmakers.

Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen

IMFUFA, Roskilde University, Denmark ( thk@ruc.dk )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

The Emergence of Nonlinear Programming: The Significance of OR

Nonlinear programming was framed as a mathematical research area in 1950 when two Princeton mathematicians Albert W. Tucker and Harold W. Kuhn presented the nonlinear programming problem and proved the famous Kuhn-Tucker theorem. A similar result had been proved already even twice: in 1939 and 1948 respectively, but only the third time it left traces behind. So the question is: Why could the result all of a sudden launch a new research field in mathematics? In the talk I will discuss the role of the post-war Office of Naval Research (ONR) context in which Kuhn and Tucker’s research was conducted and the significance of the connection to Operations Research (OR) for this phenomenon.

Bernhard  Kleeberg

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin ( kleeberg@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

From Dismal to Hopeful Science: 19th-Century Concepts of Rising Standards of Living

The paper discusses the emergence and transformations of concepts of raising the standard of living in between the fields of socioeconomic theory and practical sociopolitical action. It focuses on English and German positions respectively, which seem to have gained ground from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Enlightenment thought had provided the idea that in a society that had wisely been created by God, the welfare of its members would automatically increase. Although this idea can be found more often in the late eighteenth century, objections to it prevailed in the course of the Restauration: With moral theology condemning materialism and with population theory emphasizing the limits of agricultural production and the dangers of negative demographic feedback, early nineteenth century political economy appeared to be an anti-utopian, dismal science. From the 1840s onwards this situation started to change. Economic and social developments, technical progress and the end of the pauperism-crisis led to new expectations of wealth; the idea of universal developmental progress in the sciences, tendencies of standardization, and a growing interest in social statistics provided cognitive certitude in respect to economic diagnosis and prognosis, as well as growing confidence in the possibility of successful interference with the socioeconomic situation of the poor. Not only was Malthus’ “iron law” put into question and the opinion according to which gains on one side always lead to losses at the other criticized as an “utter fallacy” – the providential character of economic distribution of wealth was challenged as well, and with it concepts claiming individual moral efforts as the only way to overcome poverty. After the “statistical movement” had introduced social problems as a key area of investigation, the late nineteenth century saw more and more social surveys conducted that collected information about standards of living of the lower classes (e.g. income, education, living space, access to fresh water, noise exposure, etc.). These surveys explicitly sought to provide knowledge necessary for practical endeavors to raise the standard of living. In contrast to traditional poor relief that merely responded to individual situations within a system of unalterable (divine) laws, long-term improvements were held to be possible. Introducing ideas of social reorganization and economic redistribution, economics was no longer regarded as a “dismal” science – it became a “hopeful” science, suggesting that changes of the socioeconomic structures were feasible.

Parkash  Kumar

 ( pkumarvs@hotmail.com )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Origins of the Imperial Agricultural Institute:

Colonial Administration, Western Science, and the Indian Nationalist Response, c. 1880-1905

In 2005 India is celebrating the centenary of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) that is considered by many commentators today as a key institution that has promoted agricultural sciences over the years. In that context, this paper turns attention to the processes leading up to the establishment of the Imperial Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa, IARI's predecessor during the colonial times, to clarify the political economy of the organization of science in a colonial context.  The paper starts by noting a new policy of scientific improvement of crops in British India in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Initial efforts went towards the commodities of commercial value to the metropolis and to European economic interests based in India - cotton, tea, silk, and indigo. But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the policy expanded to include focus on ALL Indian crops. The inauguration of Pusa took place in the backdrop of this policy. What motivated the colonial officials to set up Pusa? This paper provides a variegated analysis of colonial science policy that also solidified in a context of new developments in Western science. The “rediscovery” of Mendelian Genetics in 1900 caused a worldwide explosion in expectancy over improvement of yield in agricultural crops and a resultant thrust towards agricultural research. The same period also saw the spread of the continental experiment station model into Britain as revealed in the famous recasting of its Rothamsted Station. The stage was thus set for the proliferation of such stations in Britain's colonies. This paper spotlights the official motivations as well as considers external impulses like the role of American philanthropy and availability of new scientific knowledge and new institutions of agricultural research as factors in the inauguration of Pusa. At the same time, the paper charts the response of Indians to the setting up of Pusa specifically and to the official policy of agricultural improvement generally. These reactions illustrate the efforts by the Indians to reconfigure a “nationalist space” within a “colonial space” in a discursive sense as well as political, social, and economic sense more directly. Although disenfranchised, the educated elite in India made a clear effort to become players in defining the destiny of the Pusa Research Institute, and an “Indian Agricultural Science.”

Ann F. La Berge Co-Author Chris Hays

Virginia Tech ( alaberge@vt.edu )

Friday  4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Science Stories: Stories Scientists Tell about Overweight and Obesity

Nutritional epidemiologists, endocrinologists,  physiologists, psychologists and nutritionists have identified causes and proposed solutions to our national problem of overweight and obesity. From ghrelin to leptin, to insulin resistance, to calcium, to the role of cortisol, each year brings additional science stories to enrich and complicate our understanding of the problem. This paper, part of a book project on overweight and obesity in America since 1950, explores some of the stories that scientists tell about obesity and overweight. My goal is to determine the role of sciences in addressing overweight and obesity. Can scientific research help the fat lose weight? Or help stop the fattening of America? My research is drawn primarily from scientific and medical journals. This scientific research is then filtered through the popular press, while some is incorporated into federal health policy—such as the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The reality of a fat and fatter America suggests that science may play only a minor role in either understanding causes of overweight and obesity or in coming up with workable solutions.

Kevin  LaGrandeur

New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) ( klagrand@nyit.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Early Modern Androids and Scientific Ambition

The factual and fictional literature of the Renaissance contains references to the creation of artificial humanoids--somewhat remarkable for an era that predates not only the era of cloning and robotics, but also the era of industry.  These figures range from images in fictional literature of talking brass heads to discussions of the homunculus by Renaissance natural philosophers and to Jewish legends of the golem. What would motivate all these images of androids in a pre-technological age?  I will examine this question in light of Early Modern scientific ambition and social values concerning such ambition.  My working theory is that these images of the artificial android represent fears about intellectual adventurousness and about human arrogance concerning their natural dominion.

Maria  Lane

University of Texas at Austin ( marialane@mail.utexas.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Cartography, Photography, and Areography: Visual Negotiations over the Planet Mars, 1899-1910

This paper examines the shift from cartography to photography in scientific representations of Mars between 1899 and 1910.  In the late 19th century, maps had served as the primary format for dissemination of knowledge regarding Martian surface features.  By the 1910s, however, maps had largely been supplanted by increasingly reliable telescopic photographs.  In the intervening years, the two representational techniques coexisted uneasily during a time of fevered interest in the red planet.  This paper shows how the interaction of the two representational media contributed to the rise and fall of scientific claims and popular beliefs regarding the Martian “canals” and the supposed inhabitants of Mars.  The practice of planetary cartography, for instance, is shown to have allied astronomy in the public mind with the emergent discipline of geography, thus encouraging acceptance of Mars as an inhabited, controllable territory.  The new photography, alternately, is shown to have substantially weakened the power of the Martian map, casting doubt on the popular representation of Mars as an actual living “world.”  In essence, the paper seeks to explain how photography redefined cartographic legitimacy and redirected both scientific and popular debates over Mars’ habitability.

Roger D. Launius

National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution ( launiusr@si.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

A Vast Scientific Harvest? Apollo and the Expansion of Knowledge About the Moon

The quotation in the title of this paper is from Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist-astronaut to visit the Moon, on Apollo 17 in December 1972. My added question mark emphasizes that there may be more to the statement than Schmitt intended. There have been a few earlier studies discussing the role of Apollo in furthering lunar science, but this paper focuses on exploring the myth and memory of Apollo as it relates to the scientific quest for knowledge about the Moon. It will emphasize how scientific ideas about the Moon originated during Apollo have changed over the thirty years since the last mission and seek to contextualize the manner in which Americans have incorporated this story, including its rich scientific legacy, into our post-modern milieu. Of course, memory, myth, and history are closely akin to each other; essentially they are stories that explain how things got to be the way they are. This paper will explore in a systematic manner the nature of memory and myth in Apollo, especially how what we learned about the Moon may or may not have served to demystify it. It will also seek to unpack the relationship of the astronaut--who has enormous iconographic importance--to lunar science and the knowledge gained. For example, the astronaut as “rockhound” is an intriguing image that shall be investigated in this study. Equally important, Apollo experience on the Moon as a trope for successful governmental action looms large in this paper. Ironically, the scientific harvest, while well ensconced in scientific literature, may not have made much sustained impact on the general perceptions about the Moon. A question to be considered here is whether or not a demystification of the Moon by the general public resulted from Apollo and then a remystification followed, or whether it never truly became demystified at all. Clearly, something quite metaphysical has been taking place recently in rise of Full Moon spiritual gatherings, Equinox services, and the like.

Jung K Lee

Mississippi State University ( jkl101@msstate.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

The “Industrial Physiology” and The Age of “Production”

One overlooked endeavor of the Progressive Era -to keep laborers, especially industrial laborers, on the job without suffering excessive or unnecessary fatigue- provides a picture that was as complex as the diverse characters in it: physiologists, public hygienists, economists, reform lawyers and social workers, scientific management engineers, politicians, businessmen and of course workers themselves. Endeavors to conserve “vital” energy for society culminated in creation of an “industrial fatigue” committee under the federal government during World War I. One consensus of the committee, despite their diverse backgrounds, was that fatigue undermined the productivity of labor. “Industrial physiology,” which not only discussed a body’s inevitable resistance to work but also investigated the relationship between fatigue and productivity, had played seemingly an important role for this consensus. How important this role had been, why physiology had evolved in this specific direction during this time, and how the consensus translated into one of the most class-contentious solutions: hours of labor regulations are the questions that I will discuss. Above all, their discourses and the relationship between labor and the “progressive” reformists seem to tell that the most penetrating idea that held them together was the amazement over their unprecedented ability to produce things, which was an undoubted proof of the “progress” of their time. As a class that produce “things” that was vital in the development of economy and a nation itself, labor seems to enjoy a brief but strong power that made science work for them.

Sean Dermot Lehane

University of Toronto ( sean.lehane@utoronto.ca )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Kuhn Since Kuhn: A Study in the Evolution of Thomas S Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science

When people hear the words ‘scientific revolution’, ‘paradigm’ and ‘incommensurability’, they think immediately of Thomas Kuhn and his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He is the historian of science who popularized the notion that science progresses by means of occasional revolutions in individual paradigms (fields), not by means of continual accretion of knowledge. For those who either support or criticize his assertions, this brief summary tends to serve as the final word on his research programme. What people are unaware of is that his views on all of these concepts changed dramatically from the time of the first publication of Structure in 1962 through to the end of his life in 1996. In major collections such as, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970), The Essential Tension (1977) and The Road Since Structure (2000), as well as in various papers, Kuhn responds directly to his critics continually rephrasing and re-explaining his beliefs. But he is not merely using different words to repeat the same thoughts; he is fundamentally reshaping his theories. In this paper I examine how his belief in paradigms, revolutions, normal science and the formation of lexica morphed over a period of 30 years and was meant to be formally restated in a massive opus not finished upon his death. I provide critical analysis of his work as he left it to see if it is any more or less applicable today than it was when he began his career.

Daryn  Lehoux

University of King's College ( daryn.lehoux@ukings.ns.ca )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Tomorrow's News Today: Astrology, Fate, and the Ways Out

Astrology was often treated as implying a strict determinism in antiquity, but this was not always the case. This paper examines the ways in which ideas about determinism and nondeterminism in astrology relate to differening ancient conceptions of physics and cosmology. By borrowing arguments from physics, or even by co-opting arguments from opponents of astrology, ancient astrologers were able to stake out several distinct and sometimes quite subtle positions on the questions of free will and determinism, which positions then had important effects on how the predictive power of the science of astrology itself was understood.

Sharon M. Leon

George Mason University ( sleon@gmu.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Bodies in Politics: US Catholics and Eugenics, 1910-1945

During the first half of the twentieth century, U.S. Catholic thinkers and eugenicists engaged in a rich and often adversarial conversation about whether or not eugenics principles constituted a sound foundation for social reform.  Focusing on the body of scientific knowledge mobilized by American eugenicists, the concept of bodily integrity in Catholic thinking, and the backdrop of the U.S. “body politic”, this paper will illuminate the ways that Catholic thinkers and  ugenicist struggled to present their perspectives as viable social visions for the community at large. Articles in Catholic and eugenics journals, organizational pamphlets from the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the American Eugenics Society, and personal communications between Catholic academics and key eugenicists reveal two increasingly developed, and frequently contradictory, concepts of the relationship between science, individual rights, and the common good.  Though the dispute between eugenicists and Catholics stemmed from a clash of fundamentally different understandings of society and community, those worldviews played out on the ground in practical terms as they fought over particular policy initiatives, such as immigration restriction, birth control for the impoverished, anti-miscegenation legislation, involuntary sterilization for the “unfit,” and health requirements for marriage certificates. On the one hand, advocates of the eugenics movement saw the science of heredity as providing the key to transforming American society by facilitating the elimination of “unfitness” and congenital disease, both physical and mental, and by fostering the growth of a vigorous and morally upright population.  The eugenics social ideology promised progressive racial improvement that would culminate in fulfilling America’s national destiny. On the other hand, Catholic social teaching envisioned a society in which individuals were invested with natural rights that took precedent over any commitment to progressive social development. Viewing the nuclear family as the basic social unit, Catholic teaching held that the state had no jurisdiction over the formation of families and that to deprive an individual of the right to reproduce was to violate a basic human right. This stance tapped into an extensive teaching on natural law that was based on scripture, tradition and human reason. Given the philosophical differences contained in these two worldviews, when eugenicists and Catholics talked about policy initiatives they discussed far more than science and religion; they discussed social relations, politics, culture, gender, race, and class.

Bernard  Lightman

York University ( lightman@yorku.ca )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

The Evolution of the Evolutionary Epic

This paper focuses on the adaptation of the evolutionary epic in the second half of the nineteenth century by a group of British scientific authors, including David Page, Arabella Buckley, Edward Clodd and Grant Allen.  First presented by Robert Chambers in his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844, the evolutionary epic was a hybrid or generic monster that shared the theme of progress with other new genres of "reflective science." It proved to be a versatile genre.  Moving forward in time from the creation of the earth, as set forth in the nebular hypothesis, to the evolution of higher life forms, provided a superb organizing principle for conveying masses of scientific information to diverse audiences.  It allowed authors to range across astronomy, geology, biology, and many other sciences.  It offered the possibility of a grand synthesis of scientific knowledge that surpassed Mary Somerville’s synoptic overviews of the physical sciences.   Many members of the Victorian reading audience encountered Darwin second-hand through reading the works of Page, Buckley, Clodd and Allen.  They constituted a group of influential scientific authors who, though sharing some of the aims of evolutionary naturalists such as Huxley and Tyndall, were by no means uncritical disciples.

Scott  Lightsey

Georgia State University ( lightsey@gsu.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Curious Craft, Subtle Craftsmen: Automata and Medieval London Politics

Chronicles of the Coronation of Richard II in 1377 describe a marvelous mechanical angel stooping from its pageant tower to proffer a crown to the young prince.  This automaton has long been assumed to simply express the symbolic relationship between the Crown and the divine.  My paper details the angel and its milieu as a product of complex political iconography signaling the power of the London Goldsmiths to the monarchy.  I have assembled the socio-technical network around this automaton by balancing the views of nobles with the upward view of the craftsmen who mounted the production of which the robotic angel was the literal and figurative pinnacle.  I argue that the allegoriaztion of the pageant in Piers Plowman, and the as-yet unremarked iconography of St. Dunstan the goldsmith, employ the angel to signal a craft ideology that deviated from the noble prerogatives written into the chronicles.

James W. Endersby and Linda E. Endersby

University of Missouri and Missouri State Museum ( endersby@missouri.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Collaboration, Authorship, and Scientific Research: Trends and Patterns among Disciplines

The reward structure within the scientific community emphasizes publication credit, perhaps even over the magnitude of a researcher’s contribution to the advancement of knowledge. This system of incentives produces many peculiarities inherent to the research process. Derek de Solla Price (1963, 1986) and Robert Merton (1968) made early contributions to the study of patterns of collaboration and coauthorship among scientists and within disciplines of science. Although there are a number of research efforts regarding authorship within individual disciplines, few investigators compare patterns of collaboration among disciplines (Endersby 1996 is an exception but is limited to the social sciences). Current research has said little about changes in the nature and the incidence of collaboration over time and in different disciplines. This paper examines coauthorship for published research among disciplines in the sciences—biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and others—focusing on differences with one another and across time. We classify credited authorship for every article in a dozen prominent journals in the sciences over a 30-year period and identify trends in multiple authorship. The paper concludes with discussion of the growth of ‘big science’ and how credit-claiming is necessary and encouraged by practices within disciplines.  We suggest how demand for authorship influences the nature of scientific research and how the history of collaboration sheds light on the future of the scientific community.

Pamela O. Long

 ( PamLong123@cs.com )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Floods, Aqueducts, and the Culture of Knowledge in Early Counter-Reformation Rome

In the 1560s after the conclusion of the Council of Trent, both the popes and the communal government of Rome undertook numerous urban projects to reorganize and reconstruct the city. Especially significant were hydraulic projects to prevent the devastating floods of Tiber River, most recently the catastrophic inundation of 1557. A parallel concern was the repair of the city bridges that were damaged by that flood. Related to flood control was the effort to reconstruct one of the ancient aqueducts, the Aqua Virgine in an attempt to provide a greater water supply to the city. A variety of men, learned, elite, and those with practical backgrounds, wrote letters and treatises, measured the city, explored the ancient aqueduct, and proposed flood control projects. Hydraulic activities engendered numerous conflicts and failures, as well as successes. This paper suggests that the conflicts that occurred around the hydraulic projects of the 1560s brought about discussion and writings of various kinds. The city became a locale where practical hydraulic activities and discursive practices on hydrology influenced one another and contributed to both the culture of knowledge and the hydraulic reform of the city itself.

Tulley  Long

Oregon State University ( tulleylong@gmail.com )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Watershed Studies: Forest Ecology and the Field at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, 1970-1980

Following in the wake of ecosystem ecology’s popularity, the initial 1970 proposal of the Coniferous Forest Biome project announced optimistic view that the basic, theoretical knowledge of the forest ecosystem could be turned into viable forest policy and management practice through computer simulations and systems modeling.  However, the vehicle for addressing these objectives was not, ultimately, the tools of systems analysis that initially constituted the core of the Biome research program.  Rather, the Biome’s Oregon site at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest created a unique environment in the 1970s where field-based researchers produced a number of groundbreaking findings that proved seminal to the program of forest science that developed at the Andrews in the subsequent decades.  The fruitfulness of these investigations during the Biome years effectively produced a legacy of place, people, and scientific questions at the Andrews that continued, hardened, and, eventually, became institutionalized when the forest was integrated into the new network of Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites in 1980.  In my paper, I examine the rich vein of research produced by the nexus of people and place at the Andrews Forest from 1970 to 1980, as well as the critical roles of these field-centered studies in shaping forest policy debates in the 1980s and 1990s.

Michael  Lynn

Agnes Scott College ( mlynn@agnesscott.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Advertising Aeronautics: The Marketing of Balloons in Europe, 1783-1820

The invention of ballooning in 1783 led to a veritable mania for aeronautics throughout Europe over the next decades.  This occurred at a crucial moment in the development of commerce and what some historians have called, not without considerable debate, a “commercial revolution.”  Aeronautic entrepreneurs, advertising in public newspapers and periodicals, whetted the public fascination for balloons and marketed this new science in a variety of forms and formats.  This paper explores the marketing strategies of balloonists and examines how and to whom they targeted their wares.  As a new product in the scientific marketplace, balloons provide an excellent opportunity to analyze how science and commerce interacted.  In addition, the marketing of balloons can help historians understand the commercialization of society at the end of the eighteenth century.

Sherrie Lynne Lyons

Empire StateCollege SUNY ( sherrie.lyons@esc.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Of Sea Serpents and Griffins, Plesiosaurs and Protoceratops:  The Meaning of Fossils Revisited.

In The Meaning of Fossils  Martin Rudwick  traced the changing meaning of fossils through history.   In this paper I explore the role fossils have played as connecting links between myth and science in two examples, one from the nineteenth century and one in the present day.  In the nineteenth century the sea serpent achieved a level of scientific legitimacy that it never had before or since. As paleontologists began dredging up plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and other relics from the past, a dramatic increase in sea serpent sightings also occurred.  The discovery of fossil “monsters” from the past suggested that the sea serpent was no longer a creature of legend, but a real organism that had possibly survived to the present. Today the convergence of myth and reality is seen in Adrian Mayor’s provocative  work The First Fossil Hunters.  Reading the narratives of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and looking at other kinds of archeological evidence in light of modern scientific knowledge, she suggests that the monsters of myth were grounded in fact. She suggests that the legend of the griffin was based on fossil remains of protoceratops.  While some paleontologists have championed her interpretation, others are extremely critical. Comparing and contrasting these two examples illustrate that the border between fact and fantasy is not as distinct as many scientists would have us believe.  I propose cultural reasons as to why the Victorians were so enamored with the sea serpent that go beyond just the discovery of fossil “monsters,” and ask if today dinosaurs also play a role in our society far more pervasive and important than their scientific study would suggest.

Katherine H Maas

Penn State University ( khm122@psu.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Pansophism and the Public Good: Philosophy and Politics in the Work of Samuel Hartlib

This paper explores the work of seventeenth-century Baconian “intelligencer” Samuel Hartlib, using the collection of Hartlib’s extant papers, specifically his scientific journal, or Ephemerides, and various petitions written to the English government. It argues that Hartlib’s dual role as a collector of knowledge (through the network of correspondence he maintained across Europe) and as a petitioner (particularly to the Parliamentary government) was integral to his use of the educational philosophy he adapted from that of Francis Bacon and Jan Amos Comenius. It facilitated the movement of scientific information across a complicated web from individual experimenters to the educational reform platforms sponsored by the government. Hartlib used his Ephemerides to accumulate information about new scientific and technological developments, which were supposed to become part of the revolutionary knowledge being taught across England. He petitioned the government for funds to further facilitate such developments and to disseminate information about them to the wider public. Hartlib embodies the intersection of the public and private roles of the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Anna  Maerker

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin ( maerker@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

The Wrong Toy for the Job: Anatomical Models Between Education and Entertainment in Late-Eighteenth-Century Vienna

In the early 1780s, wax models of human anatomy were put on display at the newly founded military surgico-medical academy Josephinum in Vienna. Despite their acknowledged accuracy the models were largely rejected both by physicians and surgeons as inadequate teaching tools. In this paper I reconstruct the artificial anatomies' cultural and disciplinary context in the city to account for the models' failure. The waxes entered the Viennese public sphere during an ongoing debate between physicians and surgeons regarding the status of their disciplines, recently fueled by daring claims of the Josephinum’s director Brambilla. The anatomical models' appeal to a lay public, and their association with non-middle-class entertainment, ultimately led to their rejection among medical professionals across the disciplines in their articulations of the relationship between medicine and surgery, and in surgeons' attempts to redefine themselves as sophisticated middle-class professionals. The notion of the model as a "toy," as alternatively an item of useless upper-class luxury or as an element of vulgar lower-class entertainment, discursively linked a number of contributing factors, such as urban intellectuals' attitudes towards virtues of the citizen and public education, and their critique of the Austrian emperor's reforms. The shared rejection of the models by Vienna surgeons and physicians alike provided a conceptual common ground which enabled a rapprochement of the two disciplines and their middle-class practitioners. On the historiographical level, I use this case study to argue for the necessity to employ a differentiated notion of “the urban public,” and to interrogate critically historical actors' claims to represent it.

Scott  Maisano

Univeristy of Massachusetts--Boston ( scott.maisano@umb.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Infinite Gesture: Automata and Emotions in Descartes, de Caus, and Shakespeare

When Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale was first performed its final stunning image of a statue coming to life doubtlessly called to mind for some in the audience the ingenious and uncanny inventions of Solomon de Caus.  The official artificer/engineer at the Jacobean court, de Caus peopled his intricate gardens and musical grottoes with pneumatically-powered automata of characters from Ovidian mythology, statues which seemed to gesture, to move, and even to sing by means of the occult fluids being pumped through them.  In his Treatise on Man René Descartes also drew inspiration from de Caus, especially from his engravings of royal fountains.  This paper explores what happens to Cartesianism-and to the charges of its cold inhuman rationality-when Shakespeare becomes a forerunner of this philosophy, one who upstages de Caus and anticipates Descartes by creating not a machine which can be mistaken for a human being but a human being (Hermione) who can be mistaken for a machine.

Daniel  Margocsy

Harvard University ( margocsy@fas.harvard.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

The Court Goes to Pont-Neuf: Popular Magic and Courtly Culture in Mid-17th-Century Paris

This paper shows how mid-17th-century French courtly culture elevated the status of the art of juggling to the rank of aristocratic pastime. La magie du Pont-Neu, an anonymous manuscript preserved at the Houghton Library, narrates how aristocrats from early modern Paris perform sleights of hand at their countryside resorts. The manuscript can probably be dated to the period between 1643 and 1659 and has not been discussed in literature previously. Unlike the previous tradition of cheap pamphlets or erudite books of secrets, La magie du Pont-Neuf addresses the emerging French aristocracy of salons in the form of a courtly dialogue. The manuscript discusses how the art of juggling might become an important tool for the survival of honnetes hommes in the courtly culture of simulation and dissimulation. It is argued that the manual dexterity present in illusionism requires the same je-ne-sais-quoi  adroitness that is prescribed for gentlemen in early modern books of conduct from Castiglione to the Chevalier du Méré. The manuscript thus illuminates how civilized courtly culture could broker its relations with the lower strata of sciences and society in the early modern period.

Jenny  Marie

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science ( j.marie@ucl.ac.uk )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

What was 'Genetics' in Early Twentieth Century Britain? The Shifting Meanings of a New Discipline.

The institutions of British genetics became increasingly agricultural after 1910. The centre of genetics moved from Cambridge University to the John Innes Horticultural Institution and the Development Commission funded most genetic research under the guise of ‘breeding’. This situation came about mainly due to the efforts of two bureaucratic bodies: the Board of Agriculture and the Development Commission. But could these administrators really have had the power to direct a discipline of which they were not part? The answer to this appears to be both yes and no. 1910 was an important year for British genetics for another reason: it saw the foundation of the British-based Journal of Genetics, edited by the geneticists, William Bateson and Reginald Punnett. The work published in the journal focused on elaborating Mendel’s laws, rather than producing improved agricultural produce. Genetics may have been institutionally agricultural, but intellectually it remained academic. However, the Board of Agriculture and the Development Commission did shape British genetics, because work in agricultural institutions tended to be conducted with agricultural organisms and they were more suitable for certain types of work. Thus British genetics, like American agricultural genetics, tended to be physiological in nature, rather than focusing on transmission.

Shirley  Martin

University of Chicago ( samartin@midway.uchicago.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Educational and Statistical Efficiency: The Early Use of Fisherian Statistics in the Colleges of Education at Minnesota and Iowa

The rapid ascendance in post-World War II psychology of statistical tests of hypotheses based on small sample theory is well documented (Rucci & Tweney, 1980).  Less is known, however, about why educators, who typically used large samples, were among the first to promote the new techniques or how widely these techniques were used in promoters' home institutions before they came into general currency.  This paper attempts to fill this lacuna through case studies of P. O. Johnson of the University of Minnesota and E. F. Lindquist of the University of Iowa, two educators whose seminal textbooks introduced Fisherian statistical techniques into education and psychology.  Prior to their acquaintance with Fisher's work, both men promoted experimentation by the method of “matched controls,” whereby two groups' distribution of pre-test scores were “matched” and their effect on post-test scores removed.  Because matching entailed loss of a large number of observations, the resulting sample was not representative of the population from which it was drawn.  I argue that it was the problem of representative sampling, and not merely the promise of increased efficiency, which primed educators' importation of Fisherian statistical techniques.  In support of my claim, I show that this interdisciplinary transfer was mediated by educators' methodological pluralism.  Because both Johnson and Lindquist did work in areas in which representativeness was a more salient concern than in experimentation--Johnson, in surveys, and Lindquist, in psychometrics--they were able to grasp small sample theory as the solution to the problem of representative sampling in experimentation.  Nevertheless, an analysis of doctoral dissertations completed between 1939 and 1945 in the colleges of education at Minnesota and Iowa indicates that the use of Fisherian statistics was consistent with the differing conceptions of “efficiency" espoused by Minnesota's Committee on Educational Research and the Iowa Testing Programs. References Rucci, A. J., & Tweney, R. D. (1980).  Analysis of variance and “the second” discipline of scientific psychology: A historical account.  Psychological Bulletin, 87(1), 166-184.

Christina  Matta

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( cmatta@wisc.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

A Dying Science?  Cryptogamic Physiology and the “Revival” of German Botany

Historians of biology have seemingly taken it as given that botany fell into decline during the nineteenth century – that zoology was expanding in both scope and academic popularity while botany lagged behind, hopelessly mired in stodgy taxonomic pursuits. In contrast to these claims, I argue that the methodological and philosophical changes Matthias Schleiden and his colleagues promoted in the late 1830s and 1840s laid the groundwork for the emergence of cryptogamic plant physiology and a botanically based bacteriology – specialties that quickly became hotbeds of active research during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when botany was supposedly in decline. These investigations led botanists into heated discussions of the defining issues in nineteenth-century biology, including (but not limited to) pleomorphism and spontaneous generation. I use the research of Ferdinand Cohn and Anton de Bary to show that cryptogamic botany offered new opportunities to pursue original research by raising new questions about development, reproduction, and other processes, but also by providing a new medium in which to debate the plasticity of organismal form and the origin of life. Furthermore, cryptogamic botany found a welcome home for intellectual and professional expansion in practical biology: botanist-bacteriologists found an outlet for their knowledge and expertise in the nascent disciplines of bacterial physiology, plant pathology, and soil science. By the end of the century, the majority of botanists holding ausserordentliche or ordentliche positions at 19 German universities had been trained as cryptogamists or had published in cryptogamic physiology or bacteriology as their main area of research; botanist-bacteriologists were also influential in the establishment of microbiological and agricultural institutes.  This evidence suggests that both the intellectual boundaries of academic botany and the implications of cryptogamic research were rapidly expanding in the nineteenth century.

Craig Sean McConnell

California State University Fullerton ( cmcconnell@fullerton.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

The Physics of Consciousness: Roger Penrose and The Emperor’s New Mind

In the mid-1970s, cognitive science emerged as an interdisciplinary field with feet in psychology, neurology, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy.  For most cognitive scientists, questions about the nature of consciousness were either too large or too diffuse to be posed in a serious way.  With the 1989 publication of The Emperor’s New Mind, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose entered this forbidden territory with the claim that quantum physics held the key to a scientific explanation of consciousness.  Penrose’s argument was epic in scope, drawing on recent developments in mathematics, physics, cosmology, and artificial intelligence, and ultimately claiming that a new physics would be required to account for consciousness.  The market for his tour de force proved to be considerable.  After an initial publishing run by an academic press, a commercial paperback version sold very well.  In this paper, I will situate Penrose’s argument in three distinct contexts: first, in the tradition of quantum theories of consciousness, then as an example of disciplinary border-crossing, and finally as an example of science popularization.  I will conclude with a consideration of the reception of Penrose’s argument by these three respective audiences: physicists, cognitive scientists, and lay readers of science popularization.

Sylvia  McGrath

Stephen F. Austin State University ( smcgrath@sfasu.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

A Delight in Nature: Frieda Cobb Blanchard, Her Mentors, and Her Scientific Education

In 1915, Harley Harris Bartlett, who, for several years, had been studying the genetics of Oenothera, the evening primrose, accepted a position at the University of Michigan where he planned to develop a new botanical garden.  He hired Frieda Cobb as his assistant.  By background and training Cobb was well-qualified to work with Bartlett.  Her decision marked an important turning point in her life.  She soon became the Assistant Director of the University of Michigan Botanical Gardens, a faculty-equivalent position that she held for the rest of her long professional career, and began doing important research in plant and animal genetics.  Her experiences illustrate some of the factors which influenced women who choose science as a career in the early twentieth century. Women have been an integral part of America's scientific community since the 1800's, and frequently such women had families and/or scientific mentors who encouraged their careers.  Frieda Cobb Blanchard's scientific mentors were her father, Nathan Augustus Cobb, a pioneer plant pathologist and nematologist whose career included research on three continents and Bartlett.  Blanchard’s own daughters became biologists thus further illustrating the importance of role models to encourage today's young women to study science.  As well as having informal home schooling, Frieda Cobb studied at Radcliffe College and the University of Illinois before moving to Ann Arbor.  There her work with Bartlett, her studies in the Botany Department, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1920, and her experiences managing the Botanical Gardens, shaped her career as a plant geneticist.   By the time of her marriage, in 1922, to Frank Nelson Blanchard, a zoologist whom she met in Ann Arbor, Frieda was already a professional scientist whose mentors, especially her father and Bartlett, had provided the nurturing support which helped her create a career in science.  Her experiences shed light on the factors helping women identify themselves as scientists and on the importance of active mentoring as a stimulus for professional careers.

Daniel  McKaughan

University of Notre Dame ( DMckaug564@aol.com )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Niels Bohr and Max Delbrück on Biological Complementarity:  Were They Looking for Other Laws of Physics?

The impact of Niels Bohr’s 1932 “Light and Life” lecture on Max Delbrück’s lifelong search for a form of “complementarity” in biology is well documented and much discussed (cf. Fisher and Lipson, 1988; Kay, 1985; Roll-Hansen, 2000; Stent 1966, 1998), but the precise nature of that influence remains subject to misunderstanding.  The standard reading, which sees Delbrück’s transition from physics into biology as inspired by the hope that investigation of biological phenomena might lead to a breakthrough discovery of new laws of physics, is colored much more by Schrödinger’s What is Life? (1944) than is often acknowledged.  Bohr’s view was that teleological and mechanistic descriptions are mutually exclusive yet jointly necessary for an exhaustive understanding of life.  Although Delbrück’s approach was empirical and less self-consciously philosophical, he shared Bohr’s hope that scientific investigation would vindicate the view that at least some aspects of life are not reducible to physico-chemical terms.

Gordon  McOuat

University of King's College ( gmcouat@dal.ca )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Kings, Patronage and Commodities: How the British Museum Went from Collecting (and Exchanging) Patronage to Collecting (and Exchanging) Commodities and What that Might Say About Natural Objects.

In the midst of a raucous nineteenth century public and internal debate over the social and scientific place of the premier imperial collections, the British Museum altered its collections policy (at least with respect to “natural” objects). This paper will track the debates between radicals and conservatives/centres and periphery, over the meaning of “natural” objects (vs. “artefacts”) in the Museum, the importance of changing models of political economy attached to natural history, and what this might mean for “natural kinds”, the possibility for exchange, and received notions of centres of calculation and accumulation.

Erika Lorraine Milam

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( elmilam@wisc.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Natural Bodies? The Changing Status of Fruit Flies as Organisms in Behavioral Research, 1950-1975

From 1950 to 1975, the contested status of fruit flies (Drosophila) as natural organisms reflected the struggle for authority between biologists with different approaches to the study of behavior.  Starting in the 1930s, fruit flies became the quintessential organisms of experimental evolution—they were a specious group of insects, were considered neurologically simple enough to behave naturally in a laboratory setting, and served as a legitimate model of evolutionary processes in nature.  Additionally, to European ethologists, fruit flies offered a far more effective approach to the naturalistic study of behavior than traditional maze-learning experiments with mice and rats.  Thus, the elaborate courtship displays of fruit flies (representative of insects more generally) provided an ideal vehicle for studying the evolution and genetic basis of innate behavior in the 1950s and 60s.  However, with the bitter debates over organismal and molecular approaches to research in the early 1970s, field research became increasingly important in the study of natural processes.  As Drosophila behavior is almost impossible to observe in the field, fruit flies were branded artificial laboratory creatures.  The role of Drosophila in the history of ethology was substantially discarded as a result of their new, non-natural, status.

David Marshall Miller

University of Pittsburgh ( dmmst115@pitt.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Galileo and the Coriolis Effect

Galileo’s powerful physical intuitions enabled him to predict numerous physical effects that were either unnoticed or misunderstood prior to his work.  Amongst the most noted of these are the isochronism of the pendulum and the time-squared law of free fall.  Here, I suggest another effect for this list:  the deflection of projectiles and falling bodies today known as the Coriolis effect.  This is not to say Galileo could have expressed the Coriolis effect in the strict mathematical form in which it was later formulated.  Nevertheless, Galileo understood, at least qualitatively, the reasons for the effect and, accordingly, predicted its presence. Galileo did not “discover” the Coriolis effect, but he did “prefigure” it.  Half a century after Galileo, Newton also predicted the Coriolis effect and used the prediction to conclusively prove that the earth moves – a result Galileo sought, but did not satisfactorily achieve.  In fact, Galileo never even considered the Coriolis effect as a path to a possible proof.  It is important and interesting to understand why.  Prima facie, Galileo’s rhetorical strategy in the relevant texts makes the Coriolis effect an inconsequential consequence of the discussion.  However, Galileo’s failure to grasp the true import of the Coriolis effect also reveals basic features of his epistemic understanding of the structure of space.  In particular, it shows Galileo thought the universe was fundamentally spherical, not linear.  Therefore, though Galileo’s prefigurement of the Coriolis effect demonstrates his striking intellectual novelty, it also binds him to the sphere-based physical traditions of his predecessors.

Roberta L. Millstein

California State University East Bay ( rmillstein@csueastbay.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Selection or Drift? Methodology in 'The Great Snail Debate', 1950s-1960s

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed debates over the relative roles of natural selection and random drift in the land snail ‘Cepaea nemoralis,’ a formative period of what William Provine has termed "The Great Snail Debate."  The disputants on each side of this debate made radically different claims; Maxime Lamotte argued for a significant role for drift in the populations of C. nemoralis, whereas Arthur J. Cain, Philip M. Sheppard, and John D. Currey relegated drift to an ineffectual process that is overwhelmed by selection.  I will explain the different methods, results, and assumptions that led the disputants to their different conclusions.  In particular, I will contrast the approach that both sides used to demonstrate selection (which included looking for correlations between snail-types and habitat-types) with the approach that Lamotte used to demonstrate drift (comparing the amount of variance in small populations with the amount of variance in large populations).

Gregg  Mitman

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( gmitman@med.wisc.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Where Ecology, Politics, and History Meet: Reclaiming The Death of Nature

When Carolyn Merchant first published The Death of Nature in 1979, the field of environmental history was in its infancy.  Although her intellectual roots began in the history of science, since the publication of The Death of Nature, Merchant has devoted much of her career to the professional development of what has now become a thriving and stimulating intellectual discipline.  While environmental history and the history of science diverged after the publication of her groundbreaking work—for reasons that this talk will explore—there is much to be gained by revisiting the intellectual project Merchant outlined in The Death of Nature: namely, the historical investigation of the relationships between epistemology, political economy, and environmental change and the normative implications of such work for furthering environmental and social justice.

Georgina Mary Montgomery

University of Minnesota ( georginamontgomery@hotmail.com )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Contested Meanings of the Word "Natural" in Field Primatology, 1930-1970

As an emerging discipline in the early 1930s, field primatology required validation in the face of lab-based critics who saw non-laboratory research as uncontrolled and of little scientific value. Clarence Ray Carpenter and Robert Mearns Yerkes both actively promoted the field during this period on the basis that natural behaviors could only be observed in the wild. However, by the late 1930s field studies were characterized by increasingly experimentalist techniques. This shift towards experimentalism was fueled by the need for funding for behavioral studies and a biomedical context that required primates for the study of social ills. Ultimately, the word "natural" became divisive for field primatology and animal behavior studies more broadly. As a result, the word underwent several re-definitions between 1930 and 1970, eventually becoming defined in terms of practice rather than behavior. By tracking the contested meanings of natural within primatology and animal behavior studies, this paper illustrates how the word "natural" was used to frame experimental studies within the realm of nature and to reconcile divisions resulting from earlier debates concerning the dichotomy between natural and artificial.

Sheena M. Morrison

National Library of Medicine ( smorrison@psc.gov )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

The National Negro Health Movement and the Public Health Service (1914-1950)

Launched by African-American reformers to improve health conditions for the black masses,the National Negro Health Movement(NNHM)grew from weekly health campaigns dating back to 1914.  As one of the longest running health campaigns of its kind, the Movement cast light on the social, political and cultural attitudes that factored into various aspects of public health practice during the first half of the twentieth century.  By the 1930s, popular education was hailed as the mainstay of public health reform, and the National Negro Health Movement served as a clearing house for the dissemination of health-related information among African American communities.  Setting the trend toward a curative approach to public health and medical practice at the end of the decade, federal funding was increasingly allotted to target specific diseases among different segments of the population.  African Americans would receive much of their information via NNHM channels.  By examining the evolution of the Movement as it intersected with federal efforts to protect the nation’s health, this paper will shed light on how moral,racial and medical ideas were conflated in the policies and activities of Public Health Service and African American health reformers as they endeavored to respond to a black health crisis.

Iwan Rhys Morus

University of Wales Aberystwyth ( irm@aber.ac.uk )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

“The Whole Secret of Successful Exhibiting”: Behind the Scenes at the Mid-Victorian Lecture

We tend to think of lectures – scientific or otherwise – as solo performances. Our attention as historians is typically focused on the man up front, whether we are studying Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution or John Henry Pepper at the Royal Polytechnic. We now know enough about the culture of Victorian scientific showmanship in its various guises to recognize that this picture is misleading. A typical lecture was not a one man show. It required the mobilization of considerable resources, material and human. We are familiar by now with invisible technicians in laboratory settings. In this paper I want to draw our attention to another kind of invisible technicians – the ones who managed the translation of laboratory effects into public settings. By looking behind the lecturers at the men who did the work, we can hope to get a richer sense of Victorian scientific culture as well as a more nuanced sense of just where the labour that goes into making successful science might be located.

Chandra  Mukerji

University of California - Davis ( cmukerji@ucdavis.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

The Politics of Water in 17th-Century Languedoc: Funding Controversies Along the Canal du Midi

The arguments over funding the construction of the Canal du Midi in southwestern France made visible the way territorial politics proceded in the period. Debates about technical competence made visible the kinds of risks thought to be at stake in the project. These included not only risks related to the engineering itself, but also the political risks associated with a more activist state and its program of infrastructural change. Questions of measurement and expertise were the main substance debated, and refusals to release funds for the work were commonly attached to claims of incompetence. This technical discourse was a way for local elites to try to regain some control over the local landscape and traditions of usage. Land, of course, was the basis of social power, and so any change to the shape and use of the landscape had political significance. But rather then debating this point, participants in and critics of the policy debated engineering knowledge and competence of projects like the Canal du Midi. This way they could claim to serve the monarch while also impeding state efforts to make France a territorial state. Documents from the Etats du Languedoc and from Toulouse illustrate these points of contention and their political deployment.

Shawn   Mullet

Harvard University ( mullet@fas.harvard.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Different in Attitude, Different in Latitude: Richard Feynman and David Bohm in Brazil

This paper shall explore the way in which localized notions of science and scientific practice can hamper the forging bonds between cultures and between regions where an imbalance of resources exist. After World War II Brazilian scientists, many of whom had received advanced training in the United States, sought to build upon earlier successful collaborations with North Americans by strengthening the bonds between the two communities and expanding the exchange from experimental fields to theoretical ones.  A major step towards this goal was achieved in 1951 with the arrival of two of the most promising young theorists in the United States, Richard Feynman and David Bohm. While Feynman had previously been in Brazil for six weeks in 1949, he remained at the Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF) in Rio from August 1951 until June 1952.  Having been let go from Princeton due to the Red Scare, in Fall 1951 Bohm took a permanent position at the University of São Paulo, where he remained until January 1955.  Both Feyman and Bohm would make disparaging comments about Brazilian physics. This paper shall explore why Feynman and Bohm’s attitudes took the form that they did.  Particular attention is paid to the way in which their views about how physics ought to be learned and practiced conflicted with science as it was done in Brazil where resources were far scarcer.

Jane H. Murphy

Princeton University ( jmurphy@princeton.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Bilingualism and the Sciences in Eighteenth-Century Cairo

This paper investigates the high rate of bilingualism among eighteenth-century Cairene practitioners of the ‘gharib’ sciences and the intellectual and social consequences of this feature. I argue that Arabic and Turkish bilingualism alongside expertise in this range of mathematical, astronomical, astrological, medical, magical and divinatory subjects allowed members of the religious scholarly class (the ulama) to negotiate the various social and linguistic divides of Ottoman Cairo and connect with the broader Ottoman Empire. While this period produced some textual scientific translations, this paper raises questions about the role of oral translations embodied in bilingual individuals.

Jim  Mussell

Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. ( j.mussell@bbk.ac.uk )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

“Passing Events”: Science and the News in the Late Nineteenth Century Periodical Press

This paper addresses news as a way of writing about science and technology in the late nineteenth century British periodical press.  As science was a professionalizing discipline, increasingly located in specialist institutions and publications, news became an important genre for the presentation of scientific information.  Scientists, their societies, and their publications increasingly provided texts in ways suitable for editors to use as copy.  The paper is in two halves: the first considers how some of the technologies of news (including photography, the telegraph, and telephone) affect the ways scientific events were presented for coverage in the periodical press; and the second discusses how the textual spaces (notes, correspondence columns, review articles, leaders etc…) that carry news necessarily shape it as a mode of writing.  As both news and the periodical press are determined by a concept of timeliness, my paper concludes with a discussion of periodicity.  The frequency of a title affects how it can respond to the passing moment: weeklies such as Chemical News and Nature allowed scientists to quickly announce results and comment; monthlies such as the Nineteenth Century provided a more reflective space in which to review more comprehensively.  What constitutes the present, I argue, is therefore determined by a title’s periodicity; as news attempts to interpret historic events in the light of the present, the shape of the news will vary according to when and how often a title appears.

Elizabeth  Neswald

National University of Ireland, Galway ( lukretz@hotmail.com )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

The Cosmology of Moses Hess

A contemporary of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Moses He is best known as a socialist philosopher and the forefather of modern Zionism. Historians have devoted much attention to his writings on political philosophy, theology and the philosophy of history. In addition to these well known works, however, Heß was also the author of numerous articles and a monograph on the natural sciences and cosmology. Digressing strongly from the mainstream of nineteenth-century scientific opinion, these works have been largely ignored historians, who tend to reduce He’s interest in scientific theory to his increasing age, the mental strain of political exile, censorship and the restrictions of his political asylum in France. This paper, in contrast, intends to show that these scientific works not only formed a fundamental pillar of He’s thought from his early writings and that a full understanding of his social and religious philosophy is not possible without an appreciation of his interpretation of the natural world. It will also show that Heß’s ideas can be interpreted within a broad, popular but historically marginalized strain of scientific thought in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. Like many scientific materialists of his time, Heß was searching through the sciences for a natural law of development that would unify the social, biological and cosmological worlds and, in the age of increasing scientific legitimacy, provide a scientific basis for his social philosophy. The foundation for a philosophy of human history was to be found in the world of nature and the laws of physics. At the same time, Heß’s philosophical assumptions led him to develop a cosmology that differed strongly from those of his materialist contemporaries in critical points.

Catherine  Nisbett

Princeton University ( cnisbett@princeton.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

The Station: Harvard's Observatory in Peru

This paper will explore the founding of Harvard’s Boyden Station in Arequipa, Peru, with an eye toward understanding the difficulty in moving a well-established operation from an area of much knowledge to an area of little knowledge.  In 1879, wealthy Uriah Boyden died, leaving nearly his entire fortune for the establishment of a high-altitude observatory.  Seven years later, Harvard succeeded in obtaining the fund for its own efforts to establish a satellite station and sent an expedition to explore the conditions in the Andes of Peru and Chile in 1889.  It was a new endeavor since although astronomers had impressionistic evidence that getting above the clouds would improve their seeing, no systematic effort to understand high-altitude astronomical meteorology had been undertaken.  The difficulties were heightened by the difficulties in administering a station in another hemisphere—concerns over communication, and shipping goods and people—and also the need to rely on untrained people to provide astronomers with the local meteorological data that they needed.  This paper focuses on the astronomers’ relationships with their new public—the astronomical information and meteorological instruments that they provided in exchange for local knowledge and services, and also on the difficulty of establishing a remote station to an institution that depends on its coherence and central management to function.  I follow Harvard’s efforts from the initial expedition to Peru through the establishment of the astronomical station in Arequipa.

Joe  November

Princeton University ( november@princeton.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

LINC: Biology’s Revolutionary Little Computer

Digital electronic computers have become a ubiquitous, indispensable component of modern biology, but there has been very little historical discussion of the enormous effort and of the epistemological and institutional transformations it precipitated undertaken by biologists and computer architects to bring information technology into the weal of biology. This effort and its consequences is most clearly manifest in a single instrument, the 1963 LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer), which stands at the center of two stories: the computerization of the biologist’s laboratory and the advent of small-scale computing.  The brainchild of Wesley Clark, “the most brilliant computer designer of his generation”, the LINC was developed specifically to address the failure of biologists during the 1950s and early 1960s to adopt computer technology. To meet biologists’ unique needs, Clark built a machine the radical design of which defied and subverted the then dominant conventions of computer architecture, in part laying the groundwork for the advent of personal computing. Moreover, LINC's developers and the biologists who employed it scrupulously documented the changes to both computer design and the practice of biology that they believed were necessary conditions of the marriage of biology and information technology. Thus, following the LINC from its inception at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to the appropriation of dozens of such machines by laboratories throughout the USA provides us the opportunity to elucidate not only the origins of many aspects of the practice of contemporary biology, but also some of the specific dynamics of the interaction between technology and science.

Brian W. Ogilvie

University of Massachusetts Amherst ( ogilvie@history.umass.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Fossils and Final Causes in the Seventeenth Century

Historians of science have long been interested in the seventeenth-century debate over the nature of fossils. Seventeenth-century naturalists and natural philosophers argued heatedly over whether “figured stones” dug out of the earth were the remains of animals and plants or “lapides sui generis,” stones which resembled living creatures but had a distinct origin. Historians’ accounts of this debate have placed it in the context of theories of generation, questions of extinction, and notions of geological change; they have focused on competing explanations of how fossils were formed. Another important context for the argument about fossils, though, was the contemporary debate over the place and scope of final causes in natural philosophy. Natural philosophers argued about whether fossils figured any existing species, how stones resembling marine animals could be found on top of high mountains, and what forces might have produced stones that looked like they had been living creatures. But lurking behind these specific arguments was the broader question of what form a proper explanation of the nature of fossils might take. Was it legitimate to inquire into their final cause—that is, the reason for which they existed? If so, what might such a cause be? This paper traces the place of fossils in discourse on final causes from the Renaissance notion of “jokes of nature” through the place of fossils in late seventeenth-century physico-theology, the attempt to demonstrate the nature and attributes of the Creator through the study of His creation. Despite physico-theologians’ claims, fossils prove to have been more refractory for them than for their Renaissance predecessors.

Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie

University of Oklahoma ( mogilvie@ou.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Helen Dean King, a Neglected Geneticist

Helen Dean King is a neglected figure both in the history of genetics and of eugenics in spite of her many accomplishments.  A prolific publisher, King is best known for her lifelong interest in the effects of inbreeding.  Beginning in 1909, she undertook a series of inbreeding experiments on albino rats at the Wistar Institute.  She published her results in 1918 and 1919, and concluded that the inbred animals compared favorably in the measured characteristics with the stock albinos.  These experiments brought her to the attention of the popular press which was fascinated by her assertion that just as inbred rats were not necessarily inferior to the outbred ones, incest taboos in humans were based on an incomplete understanding of the genetics involved.  She carried on an extensive correspondence with many of the leading geneticists of the time, who drew upon her expertise, but like many of her female contemporaries was not mentioned as a major contributor to the history of modern genetics.  In this paper, I will concentrate on aspects of King's work that are relevant to the eugenics movement in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, concentrating on King as a model illustrating women's place in the scientific community.

Donald L Opitz

University of Minnesota ( opitz@umn.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

 “No Doubtful or Uncertain Enterprise”: Balfour, Bateson, and Britain's First Chair of Genetics at Cambridge, 1894-1914

In this paper I tell the untold story of Britain’s first professorship of genetics (1912) and research station (1914) at the University of Cambridge. The move to institutionalize Mendelian genetics within Cambridge’s traditional university structure owed its success to the combined efforts of three distinct parties from the Conservative landowning aristocracy, academic biology profession, and agricultural industry. I argue that this institutionalization of Mendelism embodied the ideals of a “polite” science marked by a practice that embraced Darwinian “country-house” methods and civic values while eschewing materialistic yet “Darwinian” evolutionary theory. This model for “professionalizing” biological science contrasted with the secular, middle-class, laboratory-based variety advocated by academic biologists guided by scientific naturalism. My analysis of this case, which lies at the heart of Mendelism in Britain, emphasizes the centrality of the mix of aristocratic, academic, and agricultural interests in defining the nature and goals of genetics science and thus illuminates the critical importance of Bateson's alliances in promoting the success of Mendelism in the early twentieth century.

Margaret J. Osler

University of Calgary ( mjosler@ucalgary.ca )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Gassendi on Atomism and Resurrection

 Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) devoted himself to restoring the philosophy of Epicurus by demonstrating how—with a few modifications—it could be compatible with Christian theology and thereby serve as a complete system to replace the traditional Aristotelian foundations for natural philosophy.  The “Physics”, the second and by far the longest section of his massive Syntagma Philosophicum, published posthumously in 1658, contains his Christianized version of Epicurean atomism.  The “Physics” ends with his proof of the immortality of the human soul, which he calls “the crown of the treatise” and “the last touch of universal physics”.  This proof—and the “Physics” as a whole—concludes with a chapter on “The State of the Rational Soul after Death, and on Resurrection”.  This paper addresses the question of how Gassendi reconciled his atomism with these Christian doctrines.  He argued for the possibility of resurrection by examining a number of near death experiences and showing how these phenomena were compatible with his atomism.  In this respect, his account is similar to that of Robert Boyle in “Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of Resurrection”.  Gassendi’s concern with immortality and resurrection has direct bearing on a number of broader questions, including the limits of the mechanical philosophy, the historiographical debate about whether or not he was a libertine, and early modern disciplinary boundaries (why are considerations about the soul part of a book called “Physics”?).

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare

UC Berkeley ( osseo@post.harvard.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Poisoned Arrows, Strophanthus Hispidus, and the Rise of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in Britain and the Gold Coast (1880-1922)

The rise of pharmaceutical chemistry in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century dovetailed with the wars of imperial expansion in Africa and Asia. In the case of poisoned arrows and the plant Strophanthus chemical research and indigenous resistance became intertwined. As a result of greater access to arrow poisons from Africa, Asia and South America, European scientists created the cardiac drug Strophanthin. Reading the narrative of pharmaceutical analysis of S. hispidus  against African-European interactions in the emerging Gold Coast colony reveals the fragility of scientific authority at a period of apparent European control. The paper addresses three shifts in the relationship between S. hispidus plants, the Gur-speaking populations of the Gold Coast and the colonial administration. In the first wave, the Gur had control of S. hispidus plants, their land, and were free to use poisoned arrows if they so wished.  By 1905, a British military presence had been established within the Gur communities along the French-British borders of occupation and poisoned arrows were outlawed. Simultaneously, European understanding of the chemistry and botany behind S. hispidus  had vastly improved. In the third wave, from 1914 to 1922, the British gained control of German experimental S. hispidus gardens in Togoland. The motley harvest of “small dark brown seeds with yellowish hairy patches” triggered an ill-fated effort to develop a trade in S. hispidus between the Gold Coast and Europe. Evidence for this case is drawn from records of the British Colonial War Office, Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and Ghana National Archives.

Giuliano  Pancaldi

University of Bologna ( giuliano.pancaldi@unibo.it )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

Infinite Riches in a Little Room: Competitive Imitation in the Molding of  William Thomson's Laboratory

Competitive imitation has been spurred by travel since the times of the Grand Tour. Imitation and competition among natural philosophers seem to have followed a similar pattern. The present paper will examine how the European travels of William Thomson helped shape the laboratory that he set up at the University of Glasgow soon after his appointment to the chair of natural philosophy in 1846. By examining the instruments as well as the teaching and research carried out in the laboratory, the paper will explore the intertwining of local and non-local factors in the molding of young Thomson's natural philosophy.

Katherine  Pandora

 (kpandora@ou.edu )

Thursday 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM - Nicollet Grand Ballroom

What have we to do with Mr. Everyman, or he with us?  Refections on Professionalism, the Public, and the Digital Age.

In general, the response of historians of science and technology to the possibilities, challenges, and ambiguities presented by new media has been to postpone thinking about them until some later, more auspicious time – or to assume that others are surely better-suited to the task (the technically expert for whom hacking code presents no fears, or those with a fervent missionary gleam in their eyes about online education, or those lucky souls with relationships to deep-pocket funders). I take issue with this tendency, because it ignores the fact that the use of digital technologies is changing the nature of how knowledge is created, disseminated, and validated within the public realm, which is a matter of intense significance to any historian. In particular, the interactivity characteristic of new information ecologies presents the challenge of moving from viewing the public as an audience to instead conceiving of the public as potential partners with us in understanding the past, present, and possible futures of science and technology. This *is* the right moment to think hard about the emerging digital age and to discuss its ramifications, because it will open up one of the most sensitive issues that we, as professionals, face: What have we to do with Mr. Everyman, or he with us?

Buhm Soon  Park

National Institutes of Health ( parkb@od.nih.gov )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Another Look at Science—The Endless Frontier: A Perspective From the NIH

Vannevar Bush’s Science—The Endless Frontier, a report submitted in 1945 to President Truman, has been considered the key document that set the principle of the postwar federal support of scientific research.  Understandably, the report’s origins during the wartime and the subsequent five-year legislative debates over the creation of the National Science Foundation have been thoroughly studied; personalities of Bush and a few other key people in the debates have been well examined; and important roles played by the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission in the postwar years have been fully analyzed.  To date, however, the emergence of the National Institutes of Health as the main patron of biomedical research has been either almost neglected in the standard narrative of postwar science or seen simply as a direct outcome of the transfer of research funds from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the Public Health Service, an umbrella agency of the NIH.  In this paper I seek to offer a much complex picture of the development of the NIH, by examining its prewar changes, the PHS officials’ response to the Bush report, and a series of postwar legislations that led to the creation of several institutes within the NIH.  I also emphasize the importance of the 1947 report, Science and Public Policy, prepared by the President’s Scientific Research Board, in legitimizing the general course of the federal support of biomedical research by the NIH.  This report, called the Steelman report, named after John Steelman, the chairman of the Board and the President’s assistant, provided a comprehensive analysis of problems of biomedical research in academe and surveyed existing federal research programs.  Furthermore, I show that the establishment of the Office of Research Planning at the NIH in 1948 was directly related to the implementation of practical suggestions made in the Steelman report.

Mina  Park

Seoul National University, Republic of Korea ( bamiya@snu.ac.kr )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Turn Practical!:George R. Harrison and MIT Conferences on Spectroscopy and Its Applications

 The annual conferences at MIT on spectroscopy and its applications provided “the trading zone” where knowledge and skills were exchanged lively. These conferences attracted not only physicists, chemists and physical astronomers who traditionally made uses of spectroscopes as research tools, but also biologists, medical doctors, government officers and industrial researchers who were rather new-comers in the field. In ten conferences between 1933 and 1942, George Russell Harrison, the first director of the Spectroscopy Laboratory, emphasized the application of spectroscopy to practical problems such as the detection of food poisoning, the diagnosis of silver poisoning, the detection of impurities in metals, and even criminal investigations. The close examination of Harrison’s summer conferences will show they transgressed boundaries between science and industry as well as disciplinary boundaries between various sciences._ Then, why did these conferences emphasize the practical applications of spectroscopy? First of all, Harrison and other spectroscopists in the early 1930s had a gloomy vision for the future of spectroscopy, and therefore tried to discover some alternatives by promoting practical use of spectroscopy. Second, Harrison, the organizer of these ten conferences, had a plan to invent new automatic spectroscopic instruments, which might help non-specialists to access spectroscopy more easily. Third, Harrison tried to follow the policy of MIT’s new president, Karl T. Compton, who emphasized the balance between pure science and practical application.

Lynda  Payne

University of Missouri-Kansas City ( paynel@umkc.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Beating the Clock: Stopwatches and Spectators at Eighteenth-Century British Operations

In 1756 the prominent London Surgeon, Percivall Pott, criticised the 'absurd custom' of spectators timing the length of an operation with a stopwatch. Were operators's hands to be treated like horses' feet at races, Pott demanded? This paper examines the rise of time as a measurement of surgical dexterity in Eighteenth Century London. It analyses why surgeons and bystanders began to adopt 'quickness' as the primary marker of greatness in surgery, and the relationship of watching an operation to performing it. My findings show that it was largely surgeons themselves who encouraged certain behaviours from those who witnessed operations. As surgeons moved from operating in patients' homes to an operating theatre, they adopted new ideas (often from France) on how to control spectators and gain their approval. I examine whom argued for speed as the measurement of surgical success in London and whom opposed this view, and set their views within the wider context of the relationship of notions of pain to humanity, in the eighteenth century medical world. 

Trevor  Pearce

University of Chicago ( trpearce@uchicago.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Triadic Analogies and Divine Naturalism – Robert Fludd and the Weapon Salve

Robert Fludd (1574-1637) was a self-advertised “Trismegistian-Platonick-Rosy-crucian Doctor” and a member of the Royal College of Physicians, but he is perhaps best known for his diagrams and his debates – the latter with such luminaries as Kepler, Mersenne, and Gassendi.  He is also infamous in the history of science for championing the Weapon Salve, a medical treatment in which an ointment is applied to the wounding weapon to cure the wounded person by sympathy.  I will argue that the debate over this treatment, a polemical exchange with William Foster (a parson), is best understood in light of what might be termed Fludd’s analogical worldview: the archetypal triad of natura naturans – the Father, primal matter (Mother), and the spirit of love – is reflected by divine analogy in the structure of both the greater and lesser worlds of natura naturata.  This theological cosmology allowed Fludd to cast the Weapon Salve as divine and natural rather than magical and diabolical, thus proving the lawfulness of the cure.  Fludd’s overall picture of God and the world gave him the resources to ‘naturalize’ a treatment ordinarily viewed as magical.

Sharrona  Pearl

Harvard University ( spearl@fas.harvard.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

The Technology of Building Beauty on Nineteenth-Century Stages

Victorian prompt books and acting manuals were explicit about the necessity for heroes and heroines to appear to be beautiful.  Building on physiognomical principles that beauty was equated with goodness, the projection of physical attractiveness communicated important  character information for theatre audiences.  Drawing on lighting, costuming, and makeup technology, this paper will examine how beauty was produced for nineteenth-century stages.  I will look at the ways in which actors and theatre managers drew on prevailing scientific principles to perform physical beauty, as well as considering the concepts of male and female beauty that both actors and audiences brought to the stage.  Using the classification systems designed to guide actors in facial expressions, voice modulation, and gesture, the principles of performance constituted a system in their own right, one that was highly contingent on social, cultural, and biological notions of beauty.

Michael John Pettit

University of Toronto ( mj.pettit@utoronto.ca )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Mind on the Market: Popular Psychology and the Disciplining of Deception in Progressive Era America

Foucault-inspired scholars have rightly documented the growth of psychological authority_in 20th-century governance. Such authority and a strong disciplinary identity, however, did not guarantee financial stability or great wealth. Many of the institutional founders of modern psychology in the United States were reliant on supplemental moneys from market-oriented publications and lectures to bolster their income. While commercial pressures and incentives did not necessary determine the specific content, they did make new kinds of knowledge more thinkable. Popular psychology aimed at lay audiences and other professions like the law did considerable work in bringing the concept of deception within the purview of the discipline of psychology. This paper will focus upon the careers of Hugo Munsterberg (Harvard University), William Healy (Juvenile Court in Chicago), and Joseph Jastrow (University of Wisconsin). Although each was an innovator in expanding laboratory methods in psychology and based at major research institutions, they also spent considerable time writing popular works that catered to the public's fascination with crime and humanity's capability to deceive. In an era enthralled by both corruption and reform, commercial publishers demanded popular works that explained the psychological processes behind human deception. Although advocating the 'view from nowhere' style of objectivity in their published works, drawing on letters among themselves and publishers, one can see the extent to which these psychologists were enmeshed in the commercial culture that surrounded them. This paper will explore knowledge production at the the insecure boundary between itinerant lecturer and professional expert.

Jahnavi  Phalkey

Georgia Institute of Technology ( jahnavi.phalkey@hf.ntnu.no )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Homi J. Bhabha and Particle Accelerator Development at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay (1944-1966)

This paper will explore the status of accelerator building and acquisition efforts at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay (TIFR). These efforts will be explored particularly in TIFR's relation to the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) under the aegis of the Atomic Energy Commission, India, and its relations with other institutions already building or aspiring to build cyclotron accelerators in India. Homi J. Bhabha trained in cosmic ray physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, England and established himself within the network of the physics community in Europe immediately prior to WWII. The breakout of the war in 1939 found him on vacation in India and unable to travel to Europe. By the end of the war in 1944-45, he had established the TIFR, an institution dedicated to cosmic ray and nuclear physics research with funding from the Tata industrial house. With Indian independence in 1947, Bhabha was appointed chairperson of the newly constituted Atomic Energy Committee of India in 1948. By 1949, he began to negotiate with General Electric, New York for a Betatron accelerator for research at the TIFR. This deal did not come through because of export restrictions on dual use nuclear technologies in the USA. An accelerator group of the TIFR began to build a cyclotron and very soon also a Van de Graaff accelerator, but efforts were abandoned by the disappointed accelerator group in 1953 with the arrival of an off the shelf Cascade Generator from Phillips, Eindhoven (Netherlands). This marks the end of the first phase of acquiring accelerator equipment at the TIFR. The Atomic Energy Establishment (AEET), a research organisation under the Atomic Energy Commission of India, chaired by Bhabha was established in 1957. A 5.5 MeV Van de Graaff was received in 1962, this time at the AEET and not the TIFR from the High Voltage Engineering Corporation (HVEC). This was negotiated with the United States Atomic Energy Commission (US-AEC) in exchange for the sale of uranium rich monazite sands from India. That Bhabha both chaired the AEC and had established the TIFR meant that scientists could use the accelerator now housed in the AEET. A relationship between the two institutions was put in place, which went beyond the university laboratory versus national laboratory debate, but took the budget and equipment out of both, to a centralised and affluent AEC laboratory.

Denise  Phillips

University of Tennessee ( aphill13@utk.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

The Countryside Through Urban Eyes: Natural History, Taste and Regional Tourism in Germany, 1770-1830_

Historians of German middle-class culture have long recognized that nineteenth-century ideals of Bildung, or self-cultivation, placed central importance on proper sensitivity to the beauties of nature. Well-educated middle-class urbanites, in other words, distinguished themselves from their fellow Germans in part through their relationship to urban space's supposed opposite, the “free nature” [“freie Natur”] of the countryside. Indeed, by the early 19th century the “cultivated” classes of larger German towns spend a great deal of their leisure time in the border zone between the traditional city center and the countryside, a space that was often densely populated with pleasure gardens, theaters, promenades, and coffee houses. Slightly further away, the surrounding countryside also became a popular destination for short outings. Past work on these cultural developments has paid little attention to the role that natural scientific practices played in these urban forays into the countryside, largely because German historians tend to rigidly oppose “scientific” and “utilitarian” understandings of nature to the “aesthetic” ones that are assumed to be of greatest significance in these developments. This paper argues, in contrast, that natural history and the closely associated cameral sciences deeply shaped the perceptual habits and aesthetic expectations that educated urban visitors brought to the countryside. Focusing on the Saxon city of Dresden and its surrounding region, the paper will explore the ways in which the natural historical tradition shaped the content of early travel guides to the countryside, as well as the ways in which it informed late 18th- and early 19th-century debates about what aspects of the natural world should be considered beautiful.

Susanne   Pickert

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin ( pickert@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

From The Archives of the Earth - Fossils as Historical Evidentia During the Late Middle Ages

The interpretation of the past is generally dependent on the perspective of the interpreter looking back in time. But what is he looking at? Since late antiquity the biblical image of history had not exclusively rested on texts and artefacts but had included natural objects as well. All humans and all nature had been created by God's power and were subject to salvific history. Biblical chronology could thus declare natural objects 'eyewitnesses' of the temporality of the world. Especially fossils seemed suitable means for a demonstrative visualisation of past events (e.g. the Noachian deluge) - therefore becoming historical evidentia. My paper introduces some remarkable examples for the historisation of fossil objects and discusses the intentions of the persons involved.

J. Brian  Pitts

University of Notre Dame ( jpitts@nd.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Astronomical Ages and Genesis: Starlight Transit Time and Its Theological Reception

 Contemporary astrophysics and geology are in tension with the short terrestrial history traditionally connected to Genesis.  Stories about Genesis and geology have been told, but histories of astronomy and religion generally take the Copernican controversy, the nebular hypothesis and extraterrestrial intelligent life to be the main issues of interest.  Long stellar light transit times in relation to Biblical chronology are often ignored, despite apparently providing a lower bound on astronomical ages using very simple physics.  Here an attempt is made to sketch this story.  Tension might have arisen in the context of Day 4 of the Hexameron in the era between Roemer and Bradley, as light speed measurements and some stellar distances started to solidify (1670s-1720s).  William Herschel’s 1802 claim to see stars nearly 2,000,000 light years away posed the problem in a dramatic way, but decades were required for claims of deep astronomical time to be established and accepted.  While the rise of uniformitarian geology focused attention on Biblical chronology and encouraged schemes for lengthening it, only occasionally was astronomy invoked or addressed as a supporting argument.  Given the dearth of specialized literature, histories of geology and the (uneven but highly relevant) contemporary creation-evolution discussion provide useful entry points to the vast array of potentially relevant primary sources.  An effort is being made to search 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century astronomy texts and 19th-century works on natural theology or geology and Scripture, generally in English, to trace the reception of deep stellar light transit time among both scientists and nonscientists.

Anya  Plutynski

University of Utah ( plutynski@philosophy.utah.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Conflict and Consensus: Fisher v. Wright on the Drift Concept

Historians of biology have treated the disagreements between Fisher and Wright at great length; we are told that their differences ranged from the metaphysical to the empirical.  They were, moreover, strikingly different personalities, with different scientific styles and careers.  Despite their many and intriguing disagreements, however, my conviction is that we have come to take their agreements, and in particular, the historical significance of these agreements, too much for granted.  Fisher and Wright (1) self-consciously pitted themselves against common opponents, (2) came to some of the same substantive conclusions, and (3) provided a unified set of models and methods that served as an entryway into addressing questions about the process of evolution that did not exist previously.  One area where Fisher and Wright clearly parted ways was on the relative significance of drift in evolution.  Some have argued that the main reason for this was that Fisher viewed populations as effectively infinite.  The aim of this paper is to examine this claim more closely.  Did their disagreement about the significance of drift ultimately rest on an empirical question about the size of populations, or was it over a whole set of issues - methodological, theoretical, and empirical?  Did the disagreement rest, in part, on how they modeled or thought about drift?  Was it in part an artifact of their conceptions of a population, variation, and genetic interaction?  These are some of the questions I will address.

Patricia  Princehouse

Case Western Reserve University ( patricia@case.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Fossils, Fins, and the Fleeting Present: Macroevolution in the Wake of the Synthesis

The story of fossils “is the essential prelude to the fleeting present and the unknown future” wrote paleontologist Derek Ager in 1963, signaling the intent to promote paleontology to a more central role in evolutionary theory.  A major reason American paleontologists so embraced the Modern Synthesis of the1940s and 50s was that they had been infused with enthusiasm by Otto Schindewolf and other paleontologists of the parallel interwar German Synthesis. Post-war paleontologists felt themselves part of a team deploying fossil evidence to support the Modern Synthesis vision of incremental adaptive change brought about through the mechanism of natural selection acting on small-scale, random mutations. Fossils became vehicles of interpretation, material to be mustered in support of the new theory.  A major force behind the institutional success of paleontology during the 1950s was Preston Cloud, who embraced the Modern Synthesis approach, melding paleontology, sedimentology, geochemistry and modern ecology to use as a basis for understanding patterns of evolution.  His program had two foci, documenting evolutionary history, rate and pattern, and the practical task of developing a comprehensive chronology of geological strata that was useful to both academic paleontologists and the rapidly growing petroleum industry.  Cloud‘s efforts enhanced the professionalization of US paleontology, but the younger generation wanted more; they wanted paleontology to go beyond the bookkeeping role given it by the hardening Modern Synthesis. For fifties paleontology, the German Synthesis had supplied the vision and the Modern Synthesis the mechanisms. When the next generation (Gould, Eldredge, Schopf etc) ran up against the restricted theoretical role given to paleontology within the Modern Synthesis, they knew where to shop for alternatives.

Camilo  Quintero

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( quintero@wisc.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Women's Hats, Colombian Birds and American Scientists:

Exchanging Commodities in US-South America scientific Relations

IFew people realize that museums of natural history in the United States hold hundreds of thousands of birds in their collections.  Understanding how these collections were formed reveals an amazingly rich story of imperialism, international scientific relations, and power structures throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. United States-Colombia relations have had a very special role in this story.   Colombian birds first came to the attention of natural historians during the nineteenth century due to the trade of skins between these two countries.  At the time it became very fashionable to use exotic feathers and even small birds to decorate hats for women.  With the help of native collectors, traders shipped hundreds of thousands of birds from Bogotá for millinery purposes.  By the end of the 1940s, the millinery trade had stopped completely but Colombian birds remained a treasure.  They were now a treasure for North American ornithologists and bird watchers who now saw Colombia as the country with the most number of bird species in the world.  This paper recreates this story in dialogue with recent literatures on commodity history and US cultural imperial relations.  In particular, it explores how the flow of scientific commodities is more complex than the macroeconomic perspective that is usually attached to the flow of goods and labor in US-Latin America relations.  Colombian birds were not only extracted or bought from native hunters.  They were also, like many other scientific articles, exchanged for information, bartered, and given as gifts in exchange for scientific recognition.  Likewise, scientists, native hunters and collectors, as well as illustrators attached different meanings to the bird as a commodity.  This relation between commodities and the people associated with them proves important to understand not only how science supported U.S. expansionist interests over Latin America, but also the different levels involved in the study of U.S.-Latin America relations.

Viviane  Quirke

Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, Oxford Brookes University ( vquirke@brookes.ac.uk )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

‘Pharmaceutical Innovation and Technological Path-Dependence: The Case of Imperial Chemical Industries, ca. 1935-75’

From relative newcomers in the pharmaceutical field,  between 1935 and 1975 ICI’s Pharmaceutical Division became one of the most innovative British pharmaceutical companies, developing drugs such as the sulphonamide Sulphamezathine, the anti-malarial Paludrine, the halogenated anaesthetic Fluothane, the beta-blockers Inderal and Tenormin, and the anti-cancer drug Tamoxifen. However, ICI could also be said to have ‘missed’ a number of drugs, such as the corticosteroids developed in the 1950s and 60s. While technological path-dependence goes a long way to explaining this, the concept does not account for other missed opportunities, such as the synthetic anti-histamines. These involved the ‘same sort of chemistry’ as anti-malarials, were developed by the French chemical group Rhône-Poulenc during World War Two, and led it to drugs for diseases of the central nervous system, an area in which ICI remained weak. Similarly, ICI ‘missed’ the H2-blockers (against gastric ulcers) developed by the British subsidiary of SmithKline & French in the 1970s, and Glaxo in the 1980s. This paper examines some of the factors behind such successes and failures, which only remotely involve Britain’s changing regulatory environment. These factors include technological path-dependence, ICI’s wartime role as the British government’s largest industrial agent, its ‘Blue Sky’-like R&D programme in the 1950s, and last but not least the part played by individual scientists.

Karen A. Rader

Sarah Lawrence College ( krader@slc.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Exhibits and the American (Scientific) Imagination: Changing Strategies for Displaying Biology in U.S. Museums, 1939-1985

Starting in the 1940s, the U.S. National Museum initiated an "exhibits modernization" program, which sought to transform displays - in particular, of science and history of science - in order to incorporate newer visual techniques used in European museums.  This project reflected the particular interests of the Smithsonian leadership, as well as a more widespread desire among a new group of museum administrators and curators, who sought to reach a broader public audience for their museums.  This paper will explore a smaller subset of this trend - new displays of biological research and 'life' phenomena - in order to show how changing social relationships between museum science, research science, and American culture in the early twentieth century coincided with changes in the artifacts selected for display, as well as the means in which these things were displayed.  New biology exhibits at places like the USNM and the Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago) took shape within institutions committed to incorporating newer curatorial strategies, but also within a mid-twentieth century American society where corporate mass media, World's Fairs, and Disneyland's "dream of order" - achieved through consumer interaction with its 'imagineered' parks and nature films - prevailed.  In turn, museum displays shaped by these ideologies were themselves powerful resources for crafting the American scientific imagination in the period from the 1940s through the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation made more programmatic efforts to transform science museum exhibits into vehicles of 'informal scientific education.'

Courtenay  Raia

UCLA ( plscortena@aol.com )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

The Uncanny Anthropology of Andrew Lang: Science, Race, and Psyche in the Late Victorian Age

This paper will examine how the late 19th century British cultural anthropologist and psychical researcher, Andrew Lang, used ethnographic data from around the empire to challenge polygenic models of human biological development.  At a time when physical anthropology argued that the different races of man were separate species, and that  "lower" mean  had more in common with animals than with "higher" man, Lang looked to the psyche, and psychical research, to prove the unity of mankind.  His global study of the uncanny presented compelling evidence that  "diverse people, in times and lands and conditions of opinion most various" consistently reported the same categories of phenomena.  Although taboos and nature myths varied considerably from culture to culture,   'psychical' phenomenon (i.e. wrappings, levitation, telepathy, apparitions, clairvoyance, telekinesis etc.) recurred across place and time, persisting "as matters of belief, in full modern civilization, and attested to by trained modern witnesses."   Lang's involvement with the Society for Psychical Research led him to ask "to what extent are some educated modern observers under the same illusions as Red Men, Kaffirs, Eskimo, Samoyeds, Australians, and Maoris? To what extent does the coincidence of their testimony with that of races so differently situated and trained, justify curiosity, interest, and perhaps suspense of judgment?"   By demonstrating the uniform occurrence of spiritualistic phenomena and the shared tropes of the world’s religions, Lang gave evidence for a oneness of the human mind, inspired by God at its creation.

Chitra  Ramalingam

Harvard University ( ramaling@fas.harvard.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - I

With honor, but with little profit: William Crookes as Electrical Entrepreneur

This paper examines William Crookes' failed commercial ventures into electric lighting in the early 1880s, in an effort to illuminate the precarious position and fraught identity of the late-nineteenth-century scientific entrepreneur.  A brilliant experimentalist, whose investigations into high-vacuum electrical phenomena made possible the invention of practical incandescent bulbs as well as the discovery of X-rays and the electron, Crookes was able to support his private research and eke out a comfortable living in London as a chemical consultant, lecturer, and editor.  He failed, however, to translate his expertise into commercial success in the atmosphere of intense litigation that characterized the nascent British electrical industry.   Crookes' insecurities are evident in his efforts to position his work variously as invention, research, or discovery in different fora.  His struggles to build on his scientific reputation while also reaping financial rewards hint at some of the ambiguities inherent in making a living through science.

Erik  Rau

Drexel University ( erau@drexel.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

The Scientific Management of Scientific Revolutions: Operations Research and Library Science, 1962-1980

From its inception during World War II, operations research has served as a nexus for management and policy decision-making regarding science, technology, and medicine. Practitioners and their patrons used it not only to define and measure what was effective, but also indicate what they considered to be cutting edge and therefore modern. OR was promoted precisely because it promised scientific methods to rationally plan and implement scientific and technological progress. Far more than merely offering techniques, OR practitioners advanced the hope that the scientific revolution of World War II could be sustained, and also that the complexities of this revolution could be effectively tamed and harnessed. One place in which these ambitions were put to the test was the research library. Research libraries and librarians, long understudied among historians of science, have always shaped scientists' access to published scientific information. In the years after World War II, that information was growing by leaps and bounds, thanks to increased federal funding for research during the Cold War. Faced with the prospect of drowning in data, librarians and scientists struggled to find ways mechanizing and automating library functions. Research libraries also tried to assess the reading habits of their patrons. By the 1960s, OR promoters and progressive librarians believed OR could reveal the needs of the scientific reader and optimize the interface between information sources, technologies, and users.  OR was called on to customize and reconfigure the library's terrain of scientific knowledge.  The result was a great wave of OR studies of research library operations, and by the mid-1970s, comprehensive bibliographies of this OR scholarship compiled hundreds of works. Yet scarcely a decade later, OR was falling out of fashion in the library world. This paper traces the rise of operations research in libraries, and seeks to explain its ultimate fall. It will explain this ascent and descent not just in terms of OR's utility, but also in terms of its advocates' ability to maintain OR's symbolic power as a tool for managing scientific revolutions.

Mical  Raz

Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University ( razmicha@post.tau.ac.il )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Lobotomy as a Holistic Treatment for Mental Illness? Lobotomy in the United States 1937-1955 and the Boundaries between Organic and Behavioral Approaches in Psychiatric Medicine

Lobotomy, a surgical intervention which involves severing brain tissue with no organic evident pathology, was commonly performed in order to treat mental illness, reaching its zenith in the United States in the 1940s. Today subject to much criticism, lobotomy is viewed as epitomizing both an organic approach to mental illness, and a localizationist approach to brain function. This paper is designed to elucidate the non-organic aspect of lobotomy, and shall claim that lobotomy also manifests a holistic approach both to brain function, and to the role of the individual in society. It shall be based on a close reading of the publications of Walter Freeman, American neurologist who developed and actively promoted lobotomy, and a number of his personal letters, written between 1935 and 1955. I shall claim that the rationale for the procedure was in fact based on a consideration of social factors, including the individual’s personal situation, and the functional abilities of the individual in society. The examination of lobotomy reveals that a theory attuned to the individual’s needs, his abilities to adjust in society and an attempt to alleviate his suffering could ultimately lead to the widespread endorsement of a procedure which damaged brain tissue and caused devastating changes in the patient’s behavior. This paper shall present lobotomy not as organic medicine gone awry, but rather an example of how certain principles in the treatment of mental illness, still upheld today, can be interpreted in a manner which enables the flourishing of a procedure such as lobotomy.

David  Reid

Appalachian State University ( reidda@appstate.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Selling Education: Science, Commerce and Charity Among Religious Dissenters in Eighteenth-Century England

This paper will explore how the financial concerns of England’s dissenting academies led Religious Dissenters to make decisions regarding institutional structure and classroom instruction, particularly with respect to the natural philosophy curriculum. Because potential students had a number of dissenting academies to choose from, attracting students was an issue of on-going concern for the academies, particularly in the late eighteenth century when the persecution of Protestant dissent had nearly vanished. In response to these conditions, Dissenters sought to strengthen the bonds between the academies and the dissenting population, sometimes reaching out to non-dissenting communities as well. As a result, the academies became charitable organizations that were deeply connected to developing commercial interests. Dissenting educators deliberately targeted the commercial interests of their students and prospective donors by emphasizing the benefits of academy instruction for their student’s professional development as well as the national welfare of Britain. Natural philosophy, I argue, played a central role in this context, and dissenting educators vigorously promoted its study both within their schools and to a broad popular audience.

Susan M. Rensing

University of Minnesota ( rens0031@umn.edu )

Friday 4:00  PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

“Eugenics as an Answer to the ‘Woman Question’ in Late 19th Century America”

This presentation will discuss eugenics within the context of late 19th century debates surrounding the ‘woman question’ in America.  As part of their effort to make sex reform ‘scientific’, several women’s activists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century turned to the work of Francis Galton and the science he would name “eugenics” in 1883.  Contrary to birth control historian Linda Gordon’s assessment that these women’s activists were merely following in a tradition of ‘folklore heredity,’ my presentation will illustrate that many activists consciously analyzed scientific research on heredity, evolution, and the biology of sex in the light of their reformist goals. This presentation will analyze two eugenic answers to the ‘woman question’.  First, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s eugenic answer used Francis Galton’s work, Hereditary Genius, to argue for education and suffrage for women.  Second, the activists of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Department of Heredity claimed eugenics as a science rightfully belonging to women that necessitated women’s political empowerment.

Maria  Rentetzi

National Technical University of Athens ( mrentetz@vt.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Gender Politics and Radiaoctivity Research in interwar Terwar Vienna: The Case of the Institute for Radium Research

The paper explores the significance of political and ideological context as well as of experimental culture to the participation of women in radioactivity research. It argues that the politics of Red Vienna and the culture of radioactivity research specific to the Viennese setting encouraged exceptional gender politics within the Institute for Radium Research in the interwar years. Further the paper attempts to provide an alternative approach to narratives that concentrate on personal dispositions and stereotypical images of women in science to explain the disproportionately large number of women in radioactivity research. Instead, the emphasis here is on the institutional context in which women involved themselves in radioactivity in interwar Vienna. This approach places greater importance back on contingences of time and place, highlights the significance of the cultural and political context in a historical study, while at the same time sheds light on the interrelation between scientific practices and gender.   

Aurika  Richkiene

Institute of Botany ( aurika@botanika.lt )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Peculiarities of Botany Science Formation and Development in Lithuania

Formation of Botany in Lithuania started in the end of the eighteenth century. Vilnius University was founded in 1579. However Department of Natural Sciences was established in 1781 after the reforms in the educational system of the Great Duchy of Lithuania. The Department scientists J. E. Gilibert, G. Forster, S. Jundzilas, A. Sniadeckis made important contribution for botany. Further development of botany was influenced by historical situation however. In 1832 government of Russian Czar closed Vilnius University and the development of science was interrupted. In the beginning of the twentieth century when Lithuania became independent, after 90 years of intermission, C. Regel, L. Vailionis, V. Vilkaitis and others revived botany science at Lithuanian University and Academy of Agriculture. During the period between World War I and World War II botanical studies in the Republic of Lithuania reached the level of the research in European countries. After World War II Lithuania was occupied by Soviet army and deprived of statehood. In the post-war the positive influence to the development of botany was made by the generation of botanists of independent Lithuania University. Studies, which were developed in the independent Lithuania, according with forward-looking were continued. New research fields of botany were initiated. This paper will present overview of botany science development in Lithuania, emphasizing influence of historical situation, scientific relations among the Lithuanian and different countries botanists, influence of different scientific schools ideas to the formation of botany scientific research trends.

Marsha L. Richmond

Wayne State University ( marsha.richmond@wayne.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Women in the Department of Genetics at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

The Cold Springs Harbor Station for Experimental Evolution was established on the shores of Long Island, New York, in 1904 under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.  Under the direction of Charles Davenport, the new laboratory became one of the first private research institutes established in America to support biological investigation.  Although Davenport’s own research interests primarily focused on eugenics, research in plant and animal genetics was carried on in the new Department of Genetics, which soon became a significant center within the expanding research program in genetics in the United States.  The botanist Albert Francis Blakeslee (1874-1954) and zoologist Charles W. Metz (1889-1975) both offered employment opportunities to women in their respective divisions.  These jobs primarily went to women who had recently gained B.S. degrees in biology from nearby women’s colleges.  Initially women were hired at the level of assistant; in some cases, individuals were able to move into higher positions depending on their educational background and level of experience.  The present paper will examine the role women played in the operation of the CSH Department of Genetics between 1904 and 1930.  It will examine the pipeline established between different women’s colleges to supply scientific women for laboratory work.  It will also explore the socio-political as well as intellectual environment women experienced at CSH and link this to current historiography in the history of women's work.

David Lindsay Roberts

 ( robertsdl@aol.com )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Getting in on the Ground Floor”: Minnesota’s Encounter With the “New Math, 1954-1973

The exposure of Minnesota schools to New Math educational reforms was unusually intense, largely owing to the efforts of one man, Paul C. Rosenbloom, a noted research mathematician at the University of Minnesota.   To forward his aim of “getting Minnesota in on the ground floor” in the reform movement, Rosenbloom mobilized resources from the university, the state government, the federal government, and private foundations.  In the process he founded the Minnesota School Mathematics and Science Teaching Project (MINNEMAST), an innovative attempt to develop an integrated mathematics and science curriculum from the earliest grades. Rosenbloom left Minnesota in 1965, exhausted by the wide-ranging exertions required. MINNEMAST continued until 1973, when it finally succumbed, like many other educational projects of the time, to the cut-off of federal funds.  This paper will survey both the pedagogy and the politics associated with these activities, arguing that the Minnesota experience was in some ways unique, while at the same time vividly exemplifying key aspects of the New Math era in general: realistic calls for needed change shading into naive visions of overnight improvement; the excitement generated by inspired instructional innovations contrasted with the discouraging complications of bureaucratic red tape and academic turf battles; and unresolved tensions regarding allocating resources among students of varying perceived abilities.

Michael Frederick Robinson

University of Hartford ( mtroy_mrob@yahoo.com )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Rethinking Early U.S. Exploration: Lewis & Clark and Alexander von Humboldt

Historians have paid a great deal of attention to the Lewis and Clark expedition. In the last two years alone, American presses have published over eighty books about the expedition. Yet the fame of Lewis and Clark today stands in contrast to their relative obscurity in the early nineteenth century. Their expedition was not widely reported in the popular press, nor was it much discussed in scientific circles. Few Americans could marvel at the natural history of the far west because most of the expedition’s botanical collection was destroyed in transit to the east coast. They could not read the journals of Lewis and Clark because they only appeared in print in 1814, and then in curtailed form. Despite its success in the field, then, the Lewis and Clark expedition left few tracks on the wider culture of Jeffersonian America. Rather, it was the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt who caused a stir among early nineteenth century Americans. His 1799-1804 voyage to South America and Mexico thrilled society ladies, middle-class readers, doctors, politicians, and men of science. If the frequency of Humboldt’s appearance in antebellum newspapers, magazines, and textbooks is any measure, his expedition outshone every federal expedition until the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838. Why is this important? Because he defined the ideal of the explorer as a man of science at a time when the United States was finding its feet as an imperial power. His influence on Americans and their ideas about exploration continued long after his voyage had been eclipsed by U.S. exploring expeditions of the 1840s and 1850s. U.S. expeditions set sail with corps of "scientifics," not only to advance geographical knowledge but to enter an enlightenment tradition of imperial voyaging, a tradition that organizers hoped might advance the United States into the ranks of civilized nations. In short, it is Humboldt, not Lewis and Clark, who sits at the top of the family tree of U.S. exploration. His efforts helped establish the standards of exploration as a practice in the field and a system of meanings back home.

Nils  Roll-Hansen

Oslo Unversity ( nils.roll-hansen@filosofi.uio.no )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Interpreting the Bohr-Delbrück application of Complementarity to Biology.

“The question at issue … is whether some fundamental traits are still missing in_the analysis of natural phenomena before we can reach an understanding of  life_on the basis of physical experience”, said Niels Bohr in his 1932 lecture on “Light and Life”. This question can hardly be answered “without an examination of the meaning to be given to physical explanation still more penetrating than that to which the discovery of the quantum of action has already forced us”, he explained. Bohr apparently envisaged the possibility of a new revolution in physics in analogous to the quantum revolution. The biological complementarity that Bohr had in mind was not between teleology and mechanism. What he and his disciple Max Delbrück suggested was that as physiological research progressed complementary and apparently incompatible physiological explanations would be discovered. At the bottom of Bohr’s epistemology was the idea that a subject (observer) could never produce a complete explanation of itself, indicating a deep dualism between “mind and matter”. This was the source of the complementarities on the less general levels of the various empirical sciences. I will discuss briefly how this interpretation fits the historical development of Bohr’s and Delbrück’s views from the 1930s to the 1960s, as the molecular account of biological heredity emerged.

Dana M. Rovang

The University of Chicago ( dmrovang@uchicago.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

Professors of Magic: The Professional Magician as the Counterpoint to Science in Late Eighteenth-Century Europe

In the eighteenth century, magic in the wake of “proper” science seemed to be all but folklore.  However, interest in the occult and feats of spectacle did not disappear, and despite the majority of historiography that seeks to end the history of magic with the advent of Newton, magic as a profession took on new expressions that, while capitalizing on aspects of the occult, displayed principles of science within the established forms of legerdemain and spectacular science. Likewise, science as a popular endeavor gained purchase in the coffee houses and public displays that also contended with accusations of fraud.  I posit the professional magicians as highly skilled artisans who popularized science by entertainment, and were useful for proper science as a position of distinction.  This is seen in the popular debunking literature and visual representations of the period, which is indicative of intensifying professionalization and the rationalization of popular science. These professors of magic and their correlative denouncers used mechanistic and scientific principles in the age of reason to make the mysterious ordinary, thus drawing on rational principles in order to discredit the magician and amplifying the position of the proper scientist.  The enlightenment morality of rationality, self-education, and gentile sensibilities drew the legerdemain out of the fairgrounds, and into the theatre, providing both entertainment, and indirectly, scientific education.  This is seen in the appropriation by the early scientist in the usages of spectacular science.  In this, the professors of magic were useful foils, advancing the rationalistic enterprise of science in terms of counterexample and concepts of morality, while also providing popular usages of mechanistic entertainment that were the precursor to Victorian displays of spectacular science, gentility and morality. 

Gina  Rumore

University of Minnesota ( rumo0001@umn.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

A Natural Laboratory, A National Monument: Carving out Glaciology and Glacial Ecology in Glacier Bay, Alaska

In this talk I will analyze the science being done in a particular “natural laboratory” – Glacier Bay, Alaska – and argue that the land had a prominent effect on how the scientists who worked there came to understand their own specialties and the natural world in general. From John Muir’s “discovery” of Glacier Bay in 1879 up to the present, this ever-changing landscape has carved out a unique place in the history of science. In particular, for this talk I will focus on the work done in Glacier Bay by geologist Harry Fielding Reid from the 1890s to the 1920s and by ecologist William Skinner Cooper from the 1910s to the 1940s.  I will argue that the land had a profound effect on both their scientific practices and their scientific theories and, through them, on their respective disciplines.  This relationship between the land and the scientists was not one way, however, and my talk will end with a discussion of the effort by scientists in the 1920s to have Glacier Bay set aside as a national monument preserved for scientific study.

Brent J Ruswick

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( bjruswick@wisc.edu )

Friday 4:00  PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - B

The Biological Basis of Dependence:  The Scientific Charity Movement and the Hereditary Pauper in America, 1880-1920.

 My paper examines the development of eugenic thinking in the late-nineteenth-century reform movement known as “scientific charity.”  Members of this movement, who could be found in over one-hundred fifty American cities in the 1880s, sought to apply biology and sociological investigation to the distribution of charity, in the belief that this would let them distinguish the “deserving” and reformable poor from the “undeserving” and irredeemable pauper, and reveal the “true causes” of poverty.  By the mid 1890s the movement had produced a massive body of statistical and anecdotal evidence that, they claimed, proved the hereditary origin of chronic poverty and the futility of trying to improve the degenerate pauper’s lot.  Calls for national registration and institutionalization of all paupers of child-bearing years had existed since the early 1880s, but became a central part of the scientific charity movement’s mission by the late 1890s.  David Starr Jordan, himself a parishioner in a church led by one of the most prominent national leaders of the movement, traced the origins of eugenic thinking in America to scientific charity’s social surveys.  Yet at the very moment of biological determinism’s high tide in the first decade of the twentieth century, the scientific charity reformers denounced their earlier eugenic analysis of pauperism.  They and their immediate descendents, professional Social Workers, were two of the groups most vigorous in their objection to early-twentieth century eugenics.  In my paper I argue that their rejection of eugenic thinking must be understood within the larger context of their close affiliation with professional social science and the rejection of the “pauper” category at the end of the nineteenth century.  I trace this story by examining both the national publications authored by leaders and local studies initiated by otherwise anonymous volunteers.

Emmanuel  Saadia

The University of Chicago ( esaadia@gmail.com )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

André Thouin Encounters Jews: Science, Race and Imperialism During the French Revolution

On September 3rd 1794, André Thouin, then Director of the National Museum of Natural History, was dispatched to Rhineland and the Low Countries as Commissaire de la République by the French National Convention. His official mission was to appraise and report on the natural, economic and cultural riches of the newly conquered territories, and their potential usefulness to the French Republic. His travel account, published posthumously, offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a leading scientific figure of the time. The particular, imperial, object of his mission led Thouin to visit botanical gardens, manufactures and farms in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as to observe and take a special interest in the local populations, new subjects of the French Republic. In both Rotterdam and the Hague he was given a tour of the Jewish quarter. His description of the Jewish inhabitants is stunning: “nothing is forthcoming in their physiognomy (…) their eyes seem to announce the duplicity of their character.” To Thouin, “Jews who are exempt of the physical defaults and moral imperfections of their nation” are “uncommon.” The French Revolution is celebrated for the emancipation of French Jews. Similarly, Revolutionary science is widely regarded as progressive and cosmopolitan. How, then, can an enlightened, Jacobin scientist committed to universal Reason, make such use of irrational stereotypes? The paper attempts to unravel Thouin’s racial categories and to demonstrate that these represented a conventional view. Thouin borrowed heavily from his mentor Buffon’s conceptions of species degradation. Likewise, he drew extensively from his friend the Abbé Grégoire’s famous pamphlet on the Regeneration of French Jews. Through this study, I trace the epistemological origins of a scientific reasoning at the heart of France’s imperial project.

Ayako  Sakurai

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge ( noramonger@hotmail.com )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Learned Natural History and Plebeian Entertainment in an Estate Society

– The Establishment of the Senckenberg Museum in Early Nineteenth-century Frankfurt am Main

The Senckenberg Society for the Study of Nature (Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft), founded in 1816 in Frankfurt am Main, rose in less than a decade from an informal gathering of connoisseurs to a leading European centre for natural history. This paper locates the historical conditions of the institution’s success in the cultural ambition of Frankfurt’s learned and mercantile estates to forge a new communal identity in the wake of a major reorganization of the city’s socio-political order during the Napoleonic Wars. The Senckenberg Society achieved its meteoric rise thanks to the patronage of the wealthy merchants, who replaced the patrimonial aristocracy as the rulers of the city, and saw in the institution’s promotion of the union between the mercantile and learned estates an effective means to advance their cultural prestige. The first part of the paper uses the career of a leading member and benefactor of the Senckenberg Society, Eduard Rüppell (1794-1884), to illustrate how the practitioners and patrons formed a community of interests around the Society’s natural history collection, which became the cultural emblem of Frankfurt’s rise from a wealthy but unrefined hub of trade to a flourishing centre of cultured learning under the new mercantile regime. The second part will show how the museum negotiated a distinguished status in the city’s public sphere. Exhibitions of animals, such as itinerant menageries and shows, were regular features of Frankfurt’s life. The city’s wider public, which declined to discriminate between the museum’s cultured display and plebeian entertainment, posed a major challenge to the institution by bringing the chaotic and often liberating codes of conduct of the funfair into the museum’s exhibition rooms.

Lisa T. Sarasohn

Oregon State University ( LSarasohn@oregonstate.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Material Regeneration in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish

In 1818, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, in which a monster created from dead flesh is vivified by a scientist using electricity, to the ultimate destruction of himself and his family.  150 years earlier, Margaret Cavendish, the earliest female natural philosopher, also challenged the hubris of the emerging experimental and chemical philosophies.  In her 1668 work, The Grounds of Natural Philosophy, she envisioned an organic womb or "restoring bed," in which dead flesh could be regenerated and individuals revivified.  While partly satirical, her speculation reflects a deep uneasiness with the increasingly dominant natural philosophies of the late seventeenth century.  It demonstrates that the reception of the new ideas about nature raised questions about the nature of material being, both in its generation and possible regeneration after bodily dissolution.  While historians and literary critics have examined the emergence of science fiction during the seventeenth century in the many works about possible other worlds, Cavendish invented a form of proto-gothic literature, in which the implications of the new scientific ideas were explored in all their ramifications.

Henning  Schmidgen

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science ( schmidg@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Writing Time: F. C. Donders’s Experiments on the Physiological Time of Psychological Processes

In the mid-1860s, the Dutch physiologist Francis Cornelis Donders (1818-1889) conducted pioneering experiments on the physiological time of mental operations. Together with the doctoral thesis of his student, Johan Jacob de Jaager, Donders’s 1868 article on the speed of psychological processes counts as one of the birth certificates of experimental psychology and cognitive science. Based on new archival evidence, my paper reconstructs the material culture of experimentation in Donders’s laboratory. My main argument is that Donders’s publication relied on a sophisticated system of recording devices and writing practices, connecting instruments and handwriting by means of repeated interruptions of natural and artificial processes. This system connected temporarily human and non-human actors in a specific setting. I also consider the time management involved in these experiments. Thus, I will show that Donders’s intended to do further work on the problem of physiological time. But as he explained in his correspondence with Hermann von Helmholtz, he lacked the time to process and evaluate all the data his ingenious devices were able to produce.

Robert W Seidel

University of Minnesota ( rws@tc.umn.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

From Factory to Farm:  The Decentralization of Computing in High-Energy Physics

Computers began to play a major role in high-energy physics in the 1950s, when major accelerator laboratories adopted them for purposes of experimental control, data storage and analysis, and simulations.  The creation of the National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)saw a reaction to the use of large main-frame computers for this purpose and the creation of computer farms that both articulated the rhetoric of Robert Wilson and caused ongoing disputes within the high-energy physics community.  I will examine the rhetorical origins, practice, and reshaping of decentralized computing at Fermilab in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ioanna  Semendeferi

 ( seme0002@tc.umn.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

The Apostate:  John Gofman, the Linear Non-Threshold Radiation Model and Cancer Risks

Since the Second World War, the effects of low-level radiation on humans have been controversial.  At issue has been the validity of the linear non-threshold radiation dose-response model, according to which, any amount of radiation, however small, could cause damage on human genes and health.  Nuclear scientist and medical researcher, John Gofman, played a pivotal role in the debate.  He greatly contributed in many public-policy changes.  Historical accounts treat Gofman just as a radical anti-nuclear scientist whose ‘unscientific arguments brought’ enormous political pressure on the civilian nuclear-power industry and the regulatory agencies.  My analysis of Gofman’s involvement in the low-level radiation debate indicates that he shifted the focus of the debate from the long-term risks of genetic damage or leukemia to the short-term somatic or cancer risks. His arguments led to the introduction of the linear non-threshold radiation model as a means of estimating cancer risks quantitatively.  This was a watershed event in radiation science and politics and had a catalytic effect in the fortunes of the civilian nuclear-power industry.

David  Sepkoski

Oberlin College ( dsepkosk@oberlin.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

Building the Discipline of Paleobiology: Tom Schopf as Community Architect

In the early 1970s, the discipline of paleontology began a rapid transformation that brought the work of paleontologists into the forefront of evolutionary studies.  Over a few short years the sub-discipline of 'paleobiology' emerged as the locus of theoretical,   macroevolutionary studies emphasizing quantitative, statistical techniques of modeling and simulation drawn from other fields (such as population ecology) to examine large-scale patterns in the fossil record.  This rapid disciplinary transformation would not have been   possible without a series of important institutional developments, including the establishment of a new journal—titled simply Paleobiology—intended as an outlet for theoretical, evolutionary work. In many important respects, this transformation was engineered by a small group of young 'radicals' in the field, including Stephen Jay   Gould, David Raup, and Thomas Schopf, who self-consciously worked to promote a theoretical and methodological transformation of their discipline from a traditional, ideographic (descriptive) discipline to a 'nomothetic,' or law-producing science.  This talk will discuss the institutional context of this transformation, and will focus specifically on the efforts of Schopf as 'architect' or 'discipline builder' of paleobiology.

Suman  Seth

Cornell University ( ss536@cornell.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

The Principles of Irrationality: Hoffding, Bohr and the Older Quantum Theory

In a letter written to Paul Ehrenfest at the end of September 1925, Albert Einstein made the following intriguing distinction between kinds of theoreticians. Including himself, Ehrenfest and Niels Bohr in one camp, Einstein wrote, “[t]here exist Prinzipienfuchser [those who focus on principles] and Virtuosi. We belong, all three of us, to the first category and have (at least certainly we two) little virtuosic ability. Therefore, effect of an encounter with noted virtuosi (Born or Debye): depression. It works similarly the other way around.” This paper explores the meaning of "principles" to these three Prinzipienfuchser, focusing in particular on the work on the older quantum theory of the Dane, Niels Bohr. Drawing on work by Jan Faye, Norton Wise, and, most recently, Olivier Darrigol, I point to the importance of the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding in shaping Bohr’s approach to physics. Extending these previous authors’ stress on Høffding’s work as a resource that Bohr drew upon for the content of his quantum theoretical analyses, I suggest that a study of Høffding’s The Problems of Philosophy can illuminate the structure of Bohr’s quantum theory as well. In particular, unearthing Høffding’s understanding of the function of a “principle”as the always-inadequate bridge between incommensurable worlds of consciousness and unconsciousness, reason and emotion, continuity and discontinuity—one can trace the roots of Bohr’s own peculiar usage of the term. Prinzipienfuchser they may have been, but Bohr and Einstein did not understand principles in the same way. Where Einstein saw principles as deep reflections of a knowable world, the truth of which was guaranteed through a Leibnizian pre-established harmony, Bohr’s principles were flexible, even ambiguous. If we take at face value Einstein’s judgment of he and Bohr as kindred spirits in their obsession with principles, we must nonetheless acknowledge that what the two genuinely shared was more a common aversion to the calculational methods of practitioners like Born, Debye and Sommerfeld. Discourse to the contrary, there was no more unity to be found amongst the ways of doing theoretical physics of the Prinzipienfuchser than there was among the Virtuosi. 

Ryan  Shapiro

University of California, Santa Barbara ( ryannoah@mac.com )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

“Foreign Agents Rejoice…” Fifth Columnism in the Battle over Vivisection in Early Cold War America

Even before Pearl Harbor, both sides of the vivisection debate in the U.S. began employing Americanist and martial rhetoric. Each depicted animals as partisans in a war over vivisection and America's freedom. In the end, this rhetorical turn benefited researchers far more than antivivisectionists. This paper explores how American medical men in the early post-war period, led by the National Society for Medical Research (NSMR), further militarized vivisection debates and marginalized antivivisectionists as enemy agents of foreign masters. In the late 1940s and early 50s, under the guidance of NSMR, researchers merged images of the still fresh horrors of Nazi death camps with fears of Soviet atomic aggression and sabotage. After the Nuremberg Doctors Trial, American researchers capitalized on initial U.S. antivivisectionist support for 1933 German laws regulating vivisection (and the alleged effects of those laws) to insist that antivivisectionists were responsible for human experimentation in concentration camps. Following the revelation of the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, American scientists alleged antivivisection efforts were fatally undermining America's atomic security. Linking animal protectionists with mortal enemies of the U.S. from both the last war and the next, NSMR helped establish broad popular and legal support for animal experimentation and permanently recast debates over legislation regulating animal and human experimentation in the U.S.   Utilizing archival records, professional journals and the popular press, this study explores how early Cold War culture altered the vivisection debate and how researchers gained exclusive ownership of Americanist and martial rhetoric to neutralize the antivivisection movement.

Dana  Simmons

University of California, Riverside ( dana.simmons@ucr.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Measuring Misery: Consumer Budgets and the Minimum Wage in 19th-Century France

The great economic crises of modern France, the financial, industrial and agricultural collapses of the 1840s, 1880s-1890s and 1910s-1920s, precipitated bitter battles over worker remuneration. I argue that during these periods, debates over wages revolved around how to measure the minimum limits of need. Consumer budgets, though seemingly distant from the realm of work, became the dominant measure for calculating minimum pay rates. Economists, industrialists, and increasing numbers of workers shared the assumption that a fixed parameter, the lowest possible quantity of basic goods that a worker could or should consume, defined the amount that he or she could be paid. They concocted lists of basic consumer items that characterized a minimal lifestyle in a given profession or locality. “Subsistence,” a somewhat fuzzy category employed by revolutionaries, physiologists and political economists, gave way in the mid-nineteenth century to minimum budgets. The wage thus came to signify a minimum acceptable level of consumption, defined either physiologically, socially or legally. The modern French conflict over wages, I claim, was about normalizing consumption. The budgetary minimum wage expressed an inexorable relationship between work and consumer need. The minimum, though grounded in a formal language of natural necessity, was never defined with respect to a purely physiological datum. Even for Malthusian theorists of the subsistence wage, social and cultural factors played heavily in fixing this limit. The minimum wage expressed a logic of quantification, optimization and uniformity. It served both those who wished to control workers’ consumption and workers’ own claims to entitlements.

Patrick  Singy

Northwestern University ( p-singy@northwestern.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Perception and Percussion: Rethinking the Emergence of Modern Medicine

The emergence of modern medicine at the end of the eighteenth century is certainly one of the most crucial events in the history of medicine.  But how should we understand the nature of this medical revolution?  Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic, and many scholars before and after him, have offered a myriad of answers.  By focusing on the history of percussion of the chest, a practice often credited with being crucial to the emergence of modern medicine, this paper will suggest still another way to look at this problem. Central to its argument is the profound and yet overlooked transformation that occurred in the experience of perception at the end of the eighteenth century. This transformation affected both the way physicians perceived bodies and the way the perceptibility of these bodies was conceptualized, and consequently made possible an entirely new way of practicing medicine.

Robert A. Skipper, Jr.

University of Cincinnati ( robert.skipper@uc.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

R. A. Fisher and the Origins of Random Genetic Drift

In his 1922 paper, "On the Dominance Ratio," R. A. Fisher introduced the mathematical treatment of  what he called "Factors Not Acted on by Natural Selection. In so doing, Fisher introduced (what would ultimately be called) random genetic drift to the emerging field of theoretical population genetics. The received historical narrative of the origins of theoretical population genetics, largely due to William Provine, focuses on Sewall Wright's emphasis on drift's role in evolution and his disagreement with Fisher over that role. Moreover, the received narrative focuses on Wright's mathematical treatment of drift. Wright modeled drift using a binomial sampling process, a process usually understood as analogizing random sampling of gametes in a population to random sampling of marbles from a jar. Fisher, however, modeled drift using a branching process, a process, roughly, that may be used to trace the history of individuals in a stochastic process. Fisher's branching model is biologically more realistic than Wright's binomial sampling model. Moreover, while Fisher is typically understood as providing little to no evolutionary role for drift, his views in the 1922 paper are more tempered. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is to establish what are, arguably, Fisher's landmark contributions to the modeling of drift in evolution.

Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis

 University of Florida ( bsmocovi@history.ufl.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Science and Manifest Destiny:

 American Botanists, the “Cinchona Missions” in Latin America (1942-1945) and the Emergence of Economic Botany

This paper explores the emergence of economic botany as a scientific discipline in the context of American efforts to “procure” cinchona (the source of quinine, the famed anti-malarial agent) during the second world war.  In particular, it explores American botanists efforts to collect, purify, and transport cinchona bark during the interval of time between 1942-1945, when the traditional world supplier of quinine, the Javanese-based Banfoengsche Kininefabriek fell to the Japanese military control. Under the auspices of the Board of Economic Warfare, a US government wartime agency in charge of the accumulation of strategic materials, some twenty American botanists representing a range of traditional universities and a research centers renown for botanical study were sent to a diverse range of Andean habitats in search of the “original” or “wild” sources of cinchona.   In addition to “procurement”, these botanists were also instructed to facilitate “development plans,” and  “training plans,” that would alleviate dependency on foreign sources of quinine permanently. Part of what came to be known as the “cinchona missions”  involved “cinchona agreements” with most of the principle cinchona-producing nations of Latin America and that included the collaboration between American botanists and local developers interested in building plantation-industries that included American pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Co. (already present in non-Andean countries like Guatemala). The paper explores the complex interplay between US government wartime procurement efforts, American botanists and indigenous or local knowledge—and interest in—cinchona  with an eye to understanding the emergence of what came to be called  “economic botany”, a  science that was deeply engaged with all of these interests and that emerged immediately after the second world war through the efforts of many of these same American botanists. One of the critical components of this study will be to concentrate on American botanists vision of this science, which, while appearing to be global in perspective, in fact, ultimately served the economic interests of a growing American empire.  As the paper will explore, furthermore,  “American” botany, for “American” botanists engaged in the “cinchona missions” in fact included the flora of the entire western hemisphere.  

Eva Ahren Snickare

Nobel Museum ( eva.snickare@nobel.se )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Body parts on Display: Models and Specimens in the Collections of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Collections of models and specimens were important parts of medical institutions for research and teaching in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The history of these exhibitions concerns the formation and identity of medical science through research based on dissection and laboratory work. Visualisations of research results in the form of prepared specimens and sophisticated models were vital, not only as teaching aids and means of communication, but as research tools. The manufacturing of models, photographs, drawings and other representations were essential parts of the everyday practice in a medical institute. In this paper, taking the case of the Karolinska Institute, I will discuss the conception, making, circulation, reception and meaning of such objects. Among the sources I will draw upon are inventories, scientific articles, case records, as well as photographs, drawings, printed illustrations and models. The Karolinska Institute museum was inaugurated in 1830. Open only to medical professionals and students, the anatomical and pathological collections served diverse purposes. They were pedagogic resources (together with charts, drawings and slide projections), which grew in range and significance through the nineteenth century at the same time, interestingly, as dissection also played a more prominent role in medical education. The collections, dedicated to the memory and skill of anatomists, may also be understood as displaying scientific power. The collections were not only continuously enlarged, but their character changed with scientific and educational policy, for instance from the display of materials for object lessons to the collection of embryological and comparative zoological material. The reorganization of displays and the introduction of new media thus reveal changing scientific ideals. When the history the Karolinska Institute was written in 1910, the collections were considered central. But soon this importance drastically diminished and today little remains of the once comprehensive collections.

Ida H. Stamhuis

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam ( ih.stamhuis@few.vu.nl )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - D

Three Female Professors in Early Genetics: Unusual Careers?

Several times women played sizable roles in the establishment of a new discipline. This can be observed in the science of radioactivity, crystallography, and in genetics. After the rediscovery of Mendel's laws in 1900 the new field of genetics emerged. In the same period many universities opened their doors for females, first as students and later as teachers and researchers. Some of those entered this new area of knowledge. The following three women geneticists became professors: the Norwegian Kristine Bonnevie at the University of Christiana (now Oslo) in 1912, the Dutch Tine Tammes (1871-1947) at the University of Groningen in 1919 and the German Elisabeth Schiemann (1881-1972) at the Agricultural University of Berlin in 1930. In my paper I intend to discuss how (un)usual that was. Therefore I will to focus on the specific national settings of which each of these women was a part, as well as on characteristics of the new body of knowledge that were of an international nature.

Thomas  Stapleford

University of Notre Dame ( tstaplef@nd.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Workers, Housewives, and Economists: Defining the “American Standard of Living”, 1910 - 1940

In late nineteenth-century America, labor activists had called for a “living wage” that would enable workers to meet an ever-rising “American standard of living”.  By the 1930s, the “living wage” was a widely accepted idea, yet it had also been redefined and linked to a (frequently physiologically-based) minimum standard, reflected in a related term, the “minimum wage.”  Most historians have portrayed this shift as a subversion promoted by political conservatives and bourgeois moralism. Yet these accounts have largely overlooked the goals and work of a key group of social scientists—primarily institutionalist economists and home economists—who produced the bulk of cost-of-living studies during this time period.  I argue that most of these men and women sought to create a rich, empirically-grounded theory of consumption that would highlight the economic importance of the housewife’s role in consumption, reflect the difficulties that she faced in the modern marketplace, and demonstrate the inadequacy of neoclassical treatments of consumption (especially the theory of utility).  These same goals, however, also led the economists to reject attempts to define a “progressive” standard of living above a basic physiological minimum.  They dismissed such efforts as scientifically dubious (for, unlike neoclassical economists, they did not believe that subjective values could be quantified and compared) and ethically misguided (since families, and housewives, should be allowed to define and pursue their own ends).  In short, labor activists viewed standards of living through the lens of wages and (working-class) production while the social scientists approached the issue through the lens of (middle-class) consumption, leading the two groups to very different conclusions. 

Larry  Stewart

 (stewartl@sask.usask.ca )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Laboratory Spaces in the First Industrial Revolution

This paper seeks to explore the evolution of interior spaces of experimental laboratories with manufacturing sites in first industrial revolution.  By examining the laboratory experience of Josiah Wedgwood's assistant Alexander Chisholm, along with the efforts of James Watt, the intent is to show how laboratories functioned at the interface of manufacturing trials and philosophical debate.  Moreover, the daily life in laboratories exploded the notion of a private/public divide.  From the 1750s, experimental demonstrations before paying audiences grew out of the work undertaken amidst a wealth of instruments and apparatus simultaneously applied to philosophical experiments and industrial trials.  In the last half of the century, these experiences were transported into the laboratory spaces of manufacturing concerns.

Daniel  Stolzenberg

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science ( stolzius@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

The Science of Talismans and the Roots of Idolatry: 17th-Century Oriental Studies and the Historicization of Magic

This paper looks at early modern studies of ancient Near Eastern religions, in which idolatry was said to have originated with star worship and a concomitant practice of talismanic magic, and suggests that these studies contributed to new attitudes toward magic in general.  Since the high Middle Ages talismans had been the object of learned reflection by European scholars who sought to understand their use in terms of medicine, natural philosophy, and theology. This literature was essentially ahistorical, considering the efficacy, causal mechanisms, and ethical probity of talismanic magic as a timeless practice. 17th-century scholars, such as John Selden, Athanasius Kircher, and Isaac Vossius, instead tried to understand the use of talismans in the context of historical investigations of paganism in the ancient Orient. I argue that historicizing magical practices in this way ultimately contributed to undermining belief in their natural efficacy. An inquiry into the erudite treatises of early modern oriental philologists thus can shed light from a new angle on a classic theme in the history of science, the decline of learned belief in magic.

James  Strick

Franklin and Marshall College ( jstrick@fandm.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Marxism, Sex, and the Origin of Life: Wilhelm Reich’s Bion Experiments, 1935-1939

In exile from the Nazis in Oslo, Norway from 1934 to 1939, Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich began pursuing some of his theories about the nature of the energy behind psychic drives into the biological laboratory as a guest at Oslo University.  By 1936 he had stumbled upon a series of experiments he thought directly related to the origin of life on Earth.  His version of “dialectical materialist biology” bears interesting comparisons with the ways in which J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, Julius Schaxel, Aleksandr Oparin and others were applying Marxist philosophy to the life sciences at this time, especially to the origin of life problem.  Furthermore, an analysis of the violent reaction against Reich’s “bion experiments” from many quarters provides a window into changes in the role of sex-reform efforts, psychoanalytic politics, physical-chemical reductionism in biology, and socialist scientific movements and their responses to the rise of European fascism.

William C. Summers

Yale University ( william.summers@yale.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

“Physics and Genes: From Einstein to Delbrück”

The particulate concept of the gene can be traced, more or less directly, to experiments derived from Albert Einstein’s analysis of the photoelectric effect in 1905.  His demonstration of the particulate nature of light made it possible for physicists to bombard atoms with x-rays in the study of atomic structure.   J.A. Crowther, a student of J.J. Thompson, fortuitously exposed to some biological problems, extended this projectile-target approach to biological material. It was this target theory approach that provided Max Delbrück with a way to construct the gene as yet another invisible particulate entity. 

Kara  Swanson

Harvard University ( kswanson@fas.harvard.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - I

Courtroom Views of Academic Science:  A Biotech Patent Trial

This paper examines a definition of academic science created during a patent battle between two biotechnology corporations and the deployment of this idealized image as a standard by which to judge commercial scientists, in the context of the historical roots of this definition in the association of biotechnology and universities.  I analyze one trial in a long-running patent dispute (1992 - present) between the biotech start-up Promega Corporation and the international pharmaceutical company Hoffman-LaRoche related to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).  PCR as a scientific discovery earned Dr. Kary Mullis the Noble Prize in 1993, and since then, has provided the basis of a USD$100 million/year business for Hoffman-LaRoche.  Promega came to a San Francisco courtroom seeking to prove that two inventors concealed pertinent information from the patent office - that is, committed fraud - while seeking to patent an invention crucial to PCR's commercial success.  Using the courtroom testimony of scientists and scientific experts, I examine the ways in which lawyers were able to import academic standards of scientific authorship and behavior into the corporate setting to convince the court that these biotech scientists were frauds.  The courtroom thus provides a setting to analyze the conflicts inherent in the commodification of science, and the transformation of scientists into inventors.

James  Tabery

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh ( jgt1@pitt.edu )

Friday 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Genotype-Environment Interaction in the IQ Controversy

In 1969, Arthur Jensen ignited the highly polarized IQ controversy with his appeal to genetic factors as an explanation for the difference between average IQ scores for black and white populations. One of the issues at the center of this controversy was the concept of genotype-environment interaction (G˙E), which refers to cases where different genotypes respond non-additively to the same array of environments. Jensen and his supporters, such as Richard Herrnstein, dismissed G˙E and the complications that followed from the concept pertaining to the assessment of group differences. But critics such as Richard Lewontin and David Layzer utilized G˙E to buttress many of their arguments attacking Jensen's genetic hypothesis. Science studies scholars examining the IQ controversy have only perpetuated the debate surrounding G˙E by simply adopting either Jensen and Herrnstein’s arguments against or Lewontin and Layzer’s arguments for the importance of G˙E in order to argue against the opposite position. With this approach, important historical and philosophical questions have inevitably been left lingering: Why did disparate assessments of G˙E exist in the IQ controversy in the first place? What was the logic of these disparate assessments? And finally, how do these disparate assessments found in the IQ controversy fit into the broader history of G˙E? This essay is an attempt at answering these lingering questions with a new conceptual framework for discussing G˙E in the IQ controversy. I will argue that Jensen and Herrnstein, and Lewontin and Layzer were actually utilizing different interpretations of the G˙E concept: Jensen and Herrnstein used the biometric interpretation of the concept, or G˙E-B, while Lewontin and Layzer instead used the developmental interpretation of the concept, or G˙E-D. The distinction between G˙E-B and G˙E-D provides a conceptual framework for understanding why G˙E was so hotly debated in the IQ controversy, why it was so hotly debated long before the IQ controversy, and why it continues to be so hotly debated by historians, philosophers, and sociologists reflecting on the IQ controversy.

Ayne  Terceira

University of Florida ( aterceir@history.ufl.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Poisoned Plants:  The Social Dangers of Botany in Restoration England

This essay examines the changes in the perceptions of herbalism and botany that occurred in England during the seventeenth century.  Once considered a courtly and fashionable pursuit worthy of elite patronage, herbalism widely became associated with several medical and social reform movements during the English Civil War.  Because herbalism that emerged during the English Civil War and Interregnum years was so thoroughly entrenched in the radical sentiments of this period, it became imperative that naturalists after the Restoration who wished to solidify their place in the elite atmosphere of Royal Society science distance themselves from the philosophical tools of such radicals.   What emerged was a botanical practice that disengaged from intellectually and socially dangerous medical debates, emphasized instead the virtues of peaceful study and contemplation, and offered a standardized classification system sorely needed for imperial projects.

William  Thomas

Harvard University, History of Science Department ( thomas@fas.harvard.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

A Veteran Science: Reinventing Operations Research for a Postwar World

Between the Allied victory of 1945 and the establishment of operations research (OR) as a profession in the 1950s, an ongoing period of self-redefinition ensued among those anxious to extend the successes of wartime OR groups to problems of peace.  During the war, the use of scientists to analyze military activity was such a novel phenomenon that the application of “scientific method” (being whatever methods scientists chose to use) was considered a suitable description of OR.  Whatever methods were employed, the nature of a scientific training was seen as the basic factor that ensured that analytical results were appropriate to the operational context—provided scientists had enough authority and charisma to get close to the operation.  This paper illustrates how the novelty and ethos of wartime work infused deliberations on how to incorporate some new form of OR into a peacetime context.  Focusing here on activities at MIT, it is possible to discern how at least one group of scientists saw themselves as smoothing the transition into an era where technological expertise and executive authority could no longer be held separate.  The strategies they employed in integrating OR into academic and industrial activities are important to understanding the broader assault that was then taking place against the persistent question of how science can come to the aid of political decision making.  They run counter to the influential “cyborg” and “closed world” metaphors that endow American OR and related fields with an obsession with the power of rationality.  The history of OR is only partially one of command and control.  How OR was bent around institutions and obstinate reality, not vice versa, is a major and underappreciated part of the story. 

Charis Mary Thompson

University of California- Berkeley ( charis@berkeley.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Back to Nature?: What Happened to Ecofeminism in Poststrucutalist and Third Wave Feminisms?

Carolyn Merchant’s 1979/80 The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, argued persuasively for a view that subsequently became the core tenet of ecofeminism, namely, that the domination of women and the domination of nature are structurally linked.  In examining the scientific revolution, she made an historical argument that the rise of modern science and its economies was the motor of these twin oppressions.  The corollary that equality for women and care of the environment are two parts of a single remedy to modern exploitations united feminists and ecologists in an urgent call to action. The rise in the 1980s and’90s of poststructuralist and other varieties of third wave feminisms contained more and less explicit critiques of ecofeminism.  Among other things, ecofeminism was criticized for its essentialisms in equating women with nature and conflating one woman with another regardless of class, race or nation, and for its ethnocentrisms in embracing visions of pristine nature that mitigated against immigrants and in tolerating reproductive politics that targeted the childbearing patterns and labor exigencies of the world’s poor.  Despite rendering both women and nature multiple, contingent, and co-constructed, and nature anything but dead, third wave and poststructuralist feminisms somehow lost sight of the structuralist insight of ecofeminism that yoked together world patterns of environmental degradation and women’s oppression.  Contemporary feminisms would do well to resurrect this component of Merchant’s pathbreaking analysis.

Daniel Patrick Thurs

Cornell University ( dpt6@cornell.edu )

Saturday 1:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

Creating a Scientific Public: George Gallup, the Meaning of Science, and the Rhetoric of Polling in the 1930s

Public polling has become a ubiquitous feature of early twentieth-century life.  While some people debate the reliability of individual surveys, most pollsters do not make much attempt to defend the legitimacy of poll-taking itself based on systematic sampling procedures.  In the 1930s, however, when such polling methods were still novel, some advocates went out of their way to link them with the advance of “science.” George Gallup was one major champion of “scientific” polling.  Like many other social scientists of the 1920s and 1930s, he brought his work to the attention of advertising agencies.  As director of the American Institute for Public Opinion, Gallup also sought to communicate the power of scientific polling to newspaper readers through a syndicated column beginning in 1935.  In 1936, he scored a substantial victory for his methods, predicting the reelection of Franklin Roosevelt while a well-known national straw poll foresaw FDR’s defeat.  Claims and counter-claims about the scientific nature of Gallup’s polls during the early and mid-1930s offer a glimpse at the ways that science was being talked about in the U.S. in the years before World War II.  The meanings of science and its power as a rhetorical resource were in rapid flux in that period.  The rhetoric of scientific polling also sheds light on changing perceptions of the “public.”  Historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have explored the ways in which new instruments have transformed the objects of their measurement.  For Gallup and some of his admirers, polling gave Americans a voice and opened the door to a new era in democracy.  At the same time, the new public created by the development of scientific polling promised to provide advertisers, journalists, and politicians with new opportunities for the management and control of the masses and their ideas.

Dominique A Tobbell

University of Pennsylvania ( dtobbell@sas.upenn.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Pharmaceutical Alliances: Academic-Industry-Government Networks of

Drug Development and Policy in the Postwar United States

From the late 1950s through the 1980s, the pharmaceutical industry, led by its trade association, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association was engaged in a massive and far-reaching political and public relations campaign to convince the public that the competitive system of drug research, manufacture, and distribution, worked to the benefit of society. Facing challenges during this period from the federal government in the form of new legislation regarding drug regulation and patent reform, congressional hearings into the business practices of the industry and the safety and efficacy of its products, the nascent consumer and patient advocacy movements, and negative media representations of the industry, the pharmaceutical industry sought in these years to reshape the public’s perception of the industry and present itself as a good corporate citizen and the model child of capitalist democracy. In this paper, I argue that as part of this effort, Big Pharma sought to build productive and supportive relations with other workers in the health care field. This paper examines two venues in which such alliances were built: the PMA’s Commission on Drug Safety, in operation during 1962 and 1963, and its successor, the NAS-NRC’s Drug Research Board. On both, industry scientists sat with elite academic researchers and physicians to determine guidelines for those practicing in the pharmaceuticals and medical field, to make policy and regulatory recommendations to government agencies, and identify and then sponsor conferences, symposia, and research opportunities in areas deemed in urgent need of greater research by the Commission or the Board. I argue that through the industry’s work on the Commission and the Board, Big Pharma secured greater political support from the American Medical Association, the American Pharmaceutical Association, and the NAS-NRC, and individual scientists and clinicians; support it was then able to mobilize in its lobbying and public relations efforts.

Katherine  Tredwell

University of Oklahoma ( ktredwell@ou.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - I

The Melanchthon Circle's English Epicycle

The reformer Philip Melanchthon is an important figure in early modern science, not least because of his interest in astronomy. According to Melanchthon, astronomy should be studied not only for its utility in astrology, medicine, and other arts; the regularity of celestial motions showed that there existed a creator who governed the world and provided for humanity. Melanchthon's promotion of the study of astronomy at Wittenberg and other Lutheran universities created a large number of highly competent German astronomers who helped disseminate Copernican astronomy. In this paper I examine the impact of Melanchthon and his followers on Tudor England, emphasizing their providential reading of astronomy over the purely mathematical aspect of their writings. Thomas Digges and other English practitioners adopted the argument that astronomy provided an especially clear refutation of unbelief. I show that, rather than being the originators of results attributed to them, as previously believed, a number of important English practitioners are clearly indebted to Melanchthon and his followers.

Elly  Truitt

Harvard University ( etruitt@fas.harvard.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - F

The Quick and the Dead:  Funerary Automata and Animated Corpses, 1100-1450

The divide between living and dead was not believed to be as fixed in the Middle Ages as it often is today.  Dead saints remained active after their death, and many prominent philosophers such as Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Witelo believed that human life could be almost indefinitely prolonged through alchemical means.  By examining several medieval re-tellings of the story of Troy, saint's lives, and scientific texts, this paper demonstrates the ways in which funerary automata expose the mutable boundary between animate and inanimate, as they are used to be a quasi-living image of the dead person.  I also trace the links between moving golden mechanical, moving tomb statues, uncorrupted, embalmed corpses, and miraculously preserved and active saintly bodies. 

Roger D Turner

University of Pennsylvania ( Rogert@sas.upenn.edu )

Friday 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Ways of Knowing the Weather: Aviation, University Education, and the Development of Digital Computing

Largely as a result of the needs of commercial and military aviation, American meteorology underwent tremendous changes between 1920 and 1950. Cognitively, an empirical, geographical understanding of weather, characteristic of the US Weather Bureau in the 1920s, was largely supplanted by a quantitative and physical conception by the early 1950s.  Ideologically, theoretical rigor, university education and geophysical research became guiding ideals for professional meteorologists. Institutionally, meteorologists expanded out of the exclusive domain of the Weather Bureau, securing jobs in universities, airlines, the military, and commercial firms as well. These changes began during the late 1920s and 1930s, but it took a massive wartime (1940-1944) training program sponsored by the Army Air Force to cement them into the disciplinary culture of American meteorology. Six thousand "flying fighting weathermen," almost exclusively white men chosen for their aptitude in physics and math, were taught techniques for forecasting weather hundreds of miles away, in the absence of local knowledge, on whatever continent they might be deployed in a global war. Based in five mobilized universities, the wartime training program illustrates how universities could "scale up" production in response to a crisis. The key leader in this training program, Carl-Gustaf Rossby, used the ability to scale up as an argument for the superiority of forecasting methods based upon laws of thermo- and hydrodynamics, rather than empirical rules or geographical patterns. In the immediate post-war years, this physics-based way of knowing framed weather forecasting as a complicated problem in hydrodynamics. Fortuitously, John von Neumann was then using Eniac to solve a similarly complicated problem in hydrodynamics--modeling the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. Von Neumann and Rossby’s wartime protégés became the nucleus of the Numerical Weather Prediction project. This story thus provides the situated context for the intimate relationship between meteorology and the development of digital computing.

Jeroen  van Dongen

California Institute of Technology ( jvdongen@einstein.caltech.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Albert Einstein, Emil Rupp and the Canal Ray Experiments: a Case of Scientific Fraud?

In 1926, Albert Einstein raised the question: Is the emission of light an instantaneous process, or does it take a finite amount of time? To him, this was a fundamental question that was intimately linked to his thought about the light quantum; he designed two experiments that should decide the matter. Emil Rupp, an up and coming experimental physicist, set out to do these experiments. His results were published in the Proceedings of the Berlin Academy, immediately following Einstein’s theoretical paper. In 1935, Emil Rupp got exposed as a major scientific fraud; in a public announcement he retracted all his publications for the year 1934. However, also his results from 1926 were widely regarded as highly suspect. Recently un-covered documentary evidence "most notably the Einstein-Rupp correspondence and the Rupp Nachlass" very much suggests that Rupp indeed forged his 1926 results. Einstein would not have seen through Rupp’s forgery as he was strongly convinced of the empirical correctness of his own theoretical predictions' these appeared to be confirmed by Rupp. We will outline the Einstein-Rupp experiments, discuss the new evidence against Rupp and address the role that these experiments played in the history of quantum mechanics.

Elisabeth  van Meer

University of Minnesota ( vanm0020@tc.umn.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Emanuel ≤lechta and the Politics of Engineering in Central Europe

At the turn of the century, professionalization strategies of engineers in the Habsburg Empire became intertwined with the political climate of economic nationalism. ‘Czech’ and ‘German’ engineers separated into different educational and professional institutions. In the aftermath of World War I, a group of Czechoslovak engineers nevertheless maintained that their profession typically stood above classes, political parties, and national divisions. They referred to the “neutral” principles of scientific management to promote professional autonomy in the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. This paper will analyze the evolution of this professionalization strategy through the tumultuous life of mechanical engineer Emanuel ≤lechta (1895-1960). ≤lechta built an increasingly successful career as “independent management expert” in interwar Czechoslovakia after having spent several years in the United States studying American production methods. A concentration camp survivor, ≤lechta ultimately became the first Minister of Technology in Czechoslovakia’s communist government of 1948.

Annette B. Vogt

Max Planck Institute for History of Science ( vogt@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - A

From Case Study to Comparison--New Perspectives in the History of Women in Science

This paper will first discuss some results and trends of the history of women in science in the last 30 years. Different perspectives and case studies were chosen, with Anglo-American literature still leading. In the last decade, more case studies have been made in Germany and some East-European countries (see the Proceedings of the Prague symposia in 2003). This research primarily focuses on single case studies—from biographical sketches to biographies and dictionaries. Still there are gaps in the coverage of several disciplines as well as different countries.  Second, the paper will discuss some problems and questions about the research on women in science. Among these are the procedures of exclusion and inclusion of women scientists in different fields of academia, the role of education and family support, the different barriers against women scientists in different countries, the boundaries in disciplines and scientific institutions, the function of role models, and the existence of the "Mathilda effect" (M. Rossiter), which has underestimated the work of women scientists even in the modern history of science.  Third, the paper will discuss some trends and tasks of the research on women scientists in the future. Comparisons are now possible and necessary. The step from case study to comparison needs more than a minimum of two case studies which one can combine and compare. New questions are necessary as well as new perspectives. The task of comparison needs a closer collaboration between historians of science in all fields and many countries. One of the possible results could be the presence of more women scientists in dictionaries like the DSB, to reduce the "Mathilda effect" in our own discipline.

Mark A. Waddell

The Johns Hopkins University ( m.waddell@gmail.com )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - I

An End to Wonder?  The Jesuit Dismantling of the Preternatural in the Seventeenth Century

The notion of "disenchantment" and the concomitant demise of the preternatural, that ill-defined and troublesome repository of wonders and marvels, has most often been linked in the historiography with the rational and empirical character of the "new philosophies" rather than with the scholastic, Aristotelian tradition.  This paper suggests, however, that prominent members of the Jesuit order, arguably amongst the most significant proponents of Aristotelian philosophy in this period, engaged in a collective dismantling of the preternatural throughout much of the seventeenth century.  They were prompted in this endeavour both by the emphasis on vision and image at the core of Jesuit spirituality, and by a pressing need to affirm the most basic tenets of Thomist epistemology in the investigation of nature.

Keir  Waddington

Cardiff University ( Waddingtonk@cardiff.ac.uk )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

‘Consuming Diseased Meat as Food’: Diet, Meat and Disease in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Contemporary fears about the food we eat and about the relationship between meat and disease have resonances with debates in the nineteenth century. Victorian reforms, doctors and social commentators highlighted deficiencies in the diets of the urban poor, blending moral judgements with material concerns about nutrition, domestic knowledge and contagion. In expressing anxiety about diet and nutrition, concerns initially focused on food supply and the consequences of adulteration and fraud, but from the 1850s onwards apprehension started to be voiced about the consumption of diseased meat and its impact on health as reports multiplied about the “evils” of the meat trade. Rising food prices in the 1850s increased the market for cheap meat, whilst falling meat prices after 1870 encouraged butchers and traders to be less scrupulous about the meat they sold. Epizootics flooded the market with meat from diseased livestock as farmers and butchers sold “diseased meat en masse in order to hold their ground”. There was a market for such meat. As one witness to the Smithfield Market Commission noted in 1850, “if 100 carcases of cows were lying dead in the neighbourhood of London, he could get them all sold within twenty-our hours” no matter what their condition. Contemporaries were all too aware that “it is beyond question that the people are already very largely consuming diseased meat as food”. The trade was not limited to dishonest butchers and all too often this meat found its way into the homes and mouths of the poor. Butchers it was felt killed “poor meat to supply poor people at a poor price”. The consequences became increasing clear as doctors and veterinarians voiced fears that “the public health is materially affected by the wholesale slaughter of diseased animals as human food”. A link was made between the health of the poor, the diseased meat they were forced to consume, and domestic cooking arrangements. By the 1890s, the connection between diseased meat, health and poverty had become “the burning question of the day”. The paper explores the relationship between poverty, the consumption of diseased meat, and health. Rather than examining meat consumption from the traditional standard of living perspective that seeks to quantify the amount of meat consumed as a measure of income or living standards, it explores the qualitative evidence about the nature of the urban meat trade. It investigates the nature and quality of meat sold in urban markets and examines the extent to which diseased meat was a feature of urban markets. In doing so, it looks at why such meat proved “irresistible bait to hungry mouths” and in the process raises questions about the quantitative evidence that highlights rising meat consumption by suggesting that this conceals issues of quality. In addressing these areas of supply, demand and living standards, the paper discusses how contemporaries reacted to the supply of diseased meat and the fears that came to surround the “suspected” public health consequences of eating such meat. Within this framework the paper concludes by looking at why the poor were seen both as a group to be protected through the regulation and inspection of the meat trade and a group whose eating and cooking habits had to be reformed. In the debates surrounding diseased meat in the nineteenth century, concerns about poverty and health unpinned discussion.

Naoko  Wake

Michigan State University ( nwake@indiana.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - E

The Medicine Beyond Bones and Muscles:

l Psychiatrists and the Making of the “Science” of Human Relations, 1920s-30s

    This paper examines the American psychiatric profession’s unique effort during the 1920s and 1930s to increase its scientific credibility and professional respectability by combining its expertise with a social scientific approach to human relations. The paper focuses on two influential colloquia on personality investigation (1928, 1929), held through the joint effort of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Sociological Association, in order to demonstrate how socially and culturally oriented psychiatrists developed their critique of mainstream biological theories of illness. The paper shows how the environmentalists sought to uplift their knowledge into an authentic “science” by framing psychiatry not as a biological science but as a social science. The first colloquium invited observers from the Rockefeller Foundation, and the second colloquium successfully obtained the foundation’s support in addition to the auspices of the Social Science Research Council. This indicates that the environmentalists’ effort was not at all without success. By looking closely at the preparation and the implementation of the colloquia--in particular the effort of psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan as a primary organizer--the paper sheds light on the often-overlooked endeavor of social psychiatrists to reform what they considered to be the “imbalanced” and “non-human” medical research and education which were to dominate American medicine until the 1960s.

Stephen E. Wald

University of Wisconsin-Madison ( sewald@wisc.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

The Triumph and Travesty of Roger Sperry’s Mentalism

     Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913-1994) was among the most brilliant neuroscientists of the twentieth-century.  During the 1940s and early 50s, Sperry staged a series of ingenious physiological experiments overturning entrenched anti-connectionist theories of the day.  He then went on to win a Nobel Prize and worldwide fame for his revolutionary insights concerning the “split-brain.”  After four illustrious decades in the laboratory, however, Sperry’s career took a surprising turn.  He forsook the laboratory to promote a peculiar solution to the mind-body problem, a solution he had first fully articulated in 1965 under the term “mentalism,” and which he later claimed to have derived from his celebrated split-brain research.  By postulating consciousness as an emergent property of the brain acting downward upon neuronal processes, Sperry sought to restore mind’s supremacy over matter.  He credited his idea with inspiring both the “cognitive revolution” in psychology and a broader “consciousness revolution” in modern science.  He also hoped that mentalism would spawn a new “science of human values” fusing science and spirituality.  This paper explores what happened when a die-hard experimentalist transgressed boundaries of science to explore the implications of a “science of the soul.”  It examines relationships between Sperry's experimental science, his neurophilosophy, and his idiosyncratic historical vision of the cognitive revolution. 

John  Waller

University of Melbourne ( john.waller@unimelb.edu.au )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - I

Francis Galton, the Darwinian Revolution and the Micro-politics of Victorian Scientific Careers

In 1865 the Victorian polymath Francis Galton published Hereditary Talent and Character, the start of a lifelong commitment to investigating hereditary transmission. Galton's fascination for heredity has been explained in terms of a commitment to naturalising human inequality. This paper argues that another factor of at least equal importance has been overlooked: his determination to be accepted among the ranks of the Darwinian inner circle. Earnestly seeking to ingratiate himself with the Darwinian lobby, in the early 1860s Galton toyed with a variety of potential research projects relevant to the Darwinians. After several months, he settled on a study of eminent pedigrees. Galton's willingness to shift the direction of his scientific career during the 1860s underscores the importance of examining the micro-politics of scientific careers in addition to their broader social and political context. This account also emphasises the limitations of class-based explanations even when considering scientists whose work seems so manifestly indicative of ideological motivation.

Brendan Murphy Watters

University of Florida ( bwatters@history.ufl.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - F

Bisection of the Eccentrics: Vincent Wing’s Central Positions Between Kepler and Newton

     In 1961, Norwood Russell Hanson attracted attention when he attempted to strip Copernicus of much of his greatness, awarding it instead to Kepler, claiming Kepler was the “weld” between Copernicus and Newton.  This is only half of the story.  Between the death of Kepler and Newton’s Principia lies almost fifty years which Wilbur Applebaum charges is “among the most revolutionary in the history of scientific thought.”  At the center of the period ideologically, chronologically, and in many ways geographically, lies Vincent Wing.  Wing’s career stretches from 1640 until his death in 1668 and boasts over thirty-eight publications, including the first astronomical textbook in English, the first ephemeredes for England, and several polemics against other astronomers.  Self-educated, Wing was well-read, and at different points in his life proclaimed and defended three planetary models and at least two cosmological doctrines.  In short, Wing was highly intelligent and incredibly conflicted on the true appearance of the universe.  Because of his education, disputes, frequent publication, and shifting worldview, Vincent Wing offers a look into a relatively unexplored and poorly-understood period in the history of science.

Susanne Louise Weber

London School of Economics and Political Science ( s.l.weber@lse.ac.uk )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - A

The Body Does Not Lie: The Emergence of the Polygraph in the 20th Century

     The lie is one of the most elusive and morally problematic of human acts. This paper focuses on the project of framing this act and rendering it susceptible to direct scientific observation by means of 'lie detection.' This project began with the development of experimental psychology in the latter half of the 19th century. It culminated in the emergence of the polygraph in the 1920s. Researchers were not interested in the act of lying per se, but rather in different methods of detecting it. This meant transforming the lie into a measurable entity which could be read upon the body. Such a reading rests on a series of assumptions about connections between the mind and physiological functions. It proposes that while the mind has the capacity to deliberately misrepresent something, the body does not have the same power. Instead the 'lying body' is assumed to present marked physiological reactions. This ‘embodiment’ of the lie was and is crucially dependent upon the identity of ‘the liar’ whose lies were meant to be detected, i.e. the criminal suspect. In other words, framing the lie for the purposes of scientific observation relied upon two interrelated complexes: on one side stood the constellation of scientific disciplines (experimental psychology, criminology, and an emergent ‘forensic’ science); and on the other side was a configuration of institutions of social control (the criminal justice system). As a consequence of this interrelation, the lie was rendered tangible, recordable and discrete: an objective entity.

Lambert  Williams

Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science ( williams@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - J

Chaos, Complexity, and Computational Tinkering

     This paper puts flesh on the culture of computing that evolved around the sciences of chaos and complexity between 1960 and 1980. I begin with the facilitation thesis, or the claim that the computer is in some way a prerequisite for the ‘new style of scientific work’ and ‘virtual experimentation’ observed with the rise of complexity science. This thesis is refined along two axes. The first is to do with accuracy, and in particular how carefully the facilitation thesis must be stated if it is to harmonize with certain crucial episodes and evidence. The second axis, and the one to which most of the paper will be given over, is to do with historical richness. Here I argue that the facilitation thesis as applied to complexity can at times border on the banal, much like the claim that ‘telescopes are important to early modern astronomy’. In the case of astronomy such a claim is all very well, but early modernists have followed up on this insight with deeper questions of the form ‘what type?’, ‘used by whom?’, and ‘in what fashion?’. At present there is almost no corresponding follow-up work for the sciences of complexity. Taking snapshots that range from weather system study at MIT to the everyday dripping tap at Santa Cruz, I show that by making this step we quickly uncover a raft of intriguing insights. I shall focus on two of them: the first concerns the historical fact that complex systems have frequently been modeled and probed using not particularly complex or heavy duty computational set-ups. The second concerns a certain residual use of ‘quirky’ or ‘surprising’ computers, for example the use of analog machines by the Santa Cruz ‘dynamical systems collective’ long after analog was supposedly vanquished by digital. I try to account for this rich computational landscape in a way that gets beyond such contingencies as lack of adequate funding for computers in a new ‘fringe science’. Conceptually, I argue that in complex systems work there were and are several principled reasons to prize machines that are light, flexible, and modular rather than heavy duty yet rigid; or that there were perfectly good reasons for the use of ‘dead’ analog technology rather than digital. Most importantly, and intertwined at every step with these conceptual themes, I show a crucial cultural element that lay around complex systems work: the culture of computational tinkering.

Mary  Winbauer

University of Minnesota ( winb0013@umn.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - G

Adaptability in the Soviet Science System: R.L. Berg’s Evolutionary Genetics, 1935-1945

I will present a case study of Raissa L. Berg, a Russian geneticist of bourgeois origin, who survived Stalinist repression and the Lysenko period to pursue her research program in evolutionary genetics.  Berg described herself as a “true Darwinian” in opposition to Lysenkoists who formulated a Darwinian process based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics.  Berg’s claim to Darwinism was inherently political.  She incorporated Western developments in evolution and genetics and maintained contact with Western scientists in the 1930s and 40s, a period of high Soviet nationalism.  At the same time, Lysenkoists promoted their work as “truly proletarian and Soviet”, in keeping with “revolutionary” goals and ideology.  In this paper I focus on the period between 1935 and 1945 when Berg formed her views in evolutionary genetics.  Under Lysenkoism, any theory of evolution based on conventional genetics would need to put few limits on nature’s ability to be transformed.  In the 1940s, Berg theorized an extremely mutable genotype whereby mutability itself was naturally selected.  While her work remained consistent with conventional gene theory and advanced research in genetic evolution, its tone suited the political and ideological demands of Stalinism.  I argue that in the context of Soviet science, Berg’s work was both subversive and adaptive. My conclusions rest on an analysis of her unique approach to the field of evolutionary genetics and of the rhetoric she used to present her findings in Soviet journals in the 1940s.

Gabriel K. Wolfenstein

University of California, Los Angeles ( gkw@ucla.edu )

Sunday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - C

The Science Scene in The Strand: Popularizing Science in Late Victorian Britain

In 1891 George Newnes put out the initial issue of The Strand Magazine.  Though not the first, The Strand was one of the most successful of the British general content monthlies, perhaps attaining the level of a national institution.  Its price of six pence was easily within the reach not only of the middle-class, but of the increasingly educated – and relatively speaking wealthy – working class reader.  The initial offering ultimately sold 300,000 copies.  Following this overnight success, it easily maintained that number, often even exceeding it.  Clearly, it was a popular magazine, and for this reason alone begs for closer analysis.  But if the interest here is in the popularization of science and technology, why look at such a publication?  Would not a magazine like <i>Nature<i> be a better source?  Though most certainly not a scientific journal, I argue that The Strand’s broad ranging subject matter makes it – and its various brethren – an important place to better understand how scientific ideas and technological innovations were explained and marketed to, and popularized for, a general reading public.  For not only were there stories of wonder in its pages, but also discussions of new devices and examinations of eminent personalities.  These types of magazine allow us to better view science in context, to understand the relationship between science, technology, and the myriad of other ideas and concepts that jostled for space in the market of objects and ideas at the end of the nineteenth century.  Ultimately, this paper will suggest that publications like The Strand both reflected and created a set of common interests and values, and are a significant component in understanding the importance of popularization to the practice of science.

Doogab  Yi

Princeton University ( yi@princeton.edu )

Saturday 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Greenway Ballroom - E

The Coming of the Reversibility: The Discovery of DNA Repair Amidst Nuclear Fear

In 1956, in a letter to Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission(AEC), biophysicists at Yale University expressed their concerns on nuclear weapons testing.  They especially warned of the biological consequences of nuclear fallout on human populations: because genetic damages inflicted by radiation were “not reversible,” they would remain generation after generation.  However, scientists at the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine held a different opinion about the irreversibility of the genetic effects of radiation: they dismissed the irreversibility argument as a mere “question of semantics.”  Based on the fact that some people contracted cancer or leukemia while others failed to do so even when exposed to equal dose of radiation, they claimed that it was hard to say that the effects of radiation were not reversible.  This paper examines the contested “biological” meaning of the genetic effects of radiation expressed in the exchange of these letters amidst nuclear fear during the 1950s and 1960s.  I will explore how the question of the irreversibility of the genetic effects of radiation, a question that unexpectedly led to the discovery of a DNA repair mechanism, took shape in the context of the nuclear fallout debate and how this question was subsequently reconceptualized around notions of information and error correction.  Through the examination of research trajectories that led to the discovery of DNA excision repair, I will demonstrate that the Yale biophysicists who opposed nuclear weapons testing later ironically played a central role in the discovery of DNA excision repair, or “error-correcting codes” that suggested the reversibility of the genetic effects of radiation.  My analysis of experimental practices and a theoretical framework that biophysicists from Yale employed in their experiments will also illuminate how concern for the genetic effects of radiation in the atomic age helped reconfigure the nature of genetic stability and the implications of information theory in biology.  This paper will conclude with some discussion on the political “meaning” of the discovery of DNA repair in the 1960s.

Joseph  Zepeda

University of Notre Dame ( jzepeda@nd.edu )

Friday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - H

Aristotelian Induction and Empiricism in William Harvey's De Motu Cordis

This paper attempts to establish the influence of Aristotle’s notion of induction on William Harvey’s scientific methodology, both as expounded in the Introduction to Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium and as utilized in De Motu Cordis.  Andrew Wear’s research on the influence of the radically empiricist anatomical tradition on Harvey is taken as a point of departure.  A middle course is sought between interpretations of De Motu Cordis which underrate this influence and Wear’s interpretation, which neglects Harvey’s concern for universal knowledge.  The Introduction to De Generatione is examined in light of the edition of Aristotle that Harvey was using.  It is shown that Harvey is drawing on the notion of induction propounded in the Posterior Analytics, employing this inductive method in De Motu Cordis.  In this context it is shown that Harvey’s ‘comparative anatomy’ cannot be properly characterized without considering Harvey as working in the tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy. 

Qiong  Zhang

SIUC ( zhang@siu.edu )

Saturday 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM - Greenway Ballroom - B

From Seduction to Conversion: The Jesuit Discourse of Exotica in Late Ming and Early Qing China

When the first Jesuits arrived in the Ming Empire in 1583, they were the objects of intense curiosity and wonderment, but by the turn of the seventeenth century they themselves had become true masters of the ongoing Chinese discourse of Exotica. From Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) to Giulio Aleni (1582-1649) to Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688) and others, generations of Jesuit missionaries sought to both titillate and transform the Chinese palate for the strange and the exotic by introducing contemporary European world atlases, cosmography, and natural history to their Chinese audience. This paper probes into the Jesuit cultural politics of conversion by examining the ways in which they manipulated the indigenous Chinese material and linguistic resources to fashion a science of wonder that is familiar in tone but qualitatively different -- and unmistakably Christian -- in tenor, where the overarching theme is the omnipotence of God and the tantalizing marvels of the Christendom.