History of Science Society

2007 Annual Meeting

Abstracts A-G

Pnina Geraldine Abir-Am (Brandeis University)
Collaborative Creativity and Gender in Research Schools: Where are the Women of the Phage Group?
Research schools are multi-generational, centralized, social formations in which a variety of members ranging from senior scientists to junior ones and graduate students, collaborate with a small number of leaders, but also among themselves, while pursuing a common goal. Research schools are probably the best unit of analysis for historians interested in the phenomenon of collective creativity, a phenomenon that became increasingly prevalent in the post-WW2 era. One of the better known examples of such a research school is the so-called “Phage Group”, active in the two decades or so following its beginning circa 1943, while spanning several institutional loci on the East Coast, the West Coast, and the mid-West. In 1966, the Phage Group went public with its collective memory, in order to mark the 21st anniversary of the first Phage Course at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The Group further claimed founder status in molecular biology in the name of three dozen memories of discoveries in biochemical, microbial, and molecular genetics. No single woman could be discerned among the authors of those public memories. However, every single memory, including those by half a dozen Nobel Laureates, invariably mentioned quite a few women who collaborated with the authors or others in the Group. (for an overview see Osiris 14, ch. 12)This paper examines the collaborative patterns of women in the Phage Group, while also inquiring into the dynamics between collective creativity and gender in the 1940s and 1950s. The paper seeks to juxtapose the Phage Group women’s place in history, with their subsequent disappearance from the group’s public memory, while also paying tribute to Women Scientists in America, vol. I, a volume that addressed the challenge of recovering the life and work of “invisible” women in science.

S. Catherine Abou-Nemeh (Princeton University)
Subtle Anatomy in Eighteenth-Century Bologna: The Anatomical Wax Anatomical Models of Giovanni (1700-1755) and Anna Morandi Manzolini (1716-1774)
This paper explores the anatomical knowledge embodied in the wax sculptures and examined in the written documents produced by Anna Morandi Manzolini (1716-1774) and Giovanni Manzolini (1700-1755). It examines how that knowledge was shaped by the anatomists’ experience as dissectioners and by the artistic conventions of medical representation of the time. Broadly, the wax anatomical figures of the Manzolinis open onto a much richer network of questions about the status of disciplines like anatomy and sculpture in eighteenth-century Bologna, about the artistic-scientific history of fashioning models of human body parts, about the ambivalence among norms and ideals, about the desire and ability to deconstruct and reconstruct the body, as well as about visionaries and patrons like Marsili and Pope Benedict XIV, who patronized the arts and sciences and reformed research institutions in Bologna. Engagement with wax anatomical representations, rather than sections of a decomposing cadaver, allowed the curious gaze and visceral involvement in medical dissections to change into a more palatable detachment for students, spectators, and experts alike. And while Anna Morandi and Giovanni Manzolini participated in the eighteenth century culture of classification of natural knowledge, they also took part in an interdisciplinary discourse of art and wax modeling that largely encouraged the development of their anatomical expertise. This interest in artificially reproducing human anatomy emerged from earlier notions of curiositas and wonder about the body as machine. Further, this occupation grew in scope as it was concomitant with academic and civic efforts to develop and strengthen medical and scientific learning in Bologna.

Miruna Achim (Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico City)
Lizards in a Box: Testing out Medicines in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
During the 1780s, the announcement by a Guatemalan doctor that lizards could cure cancer, venereal disease, and leprosy became a pretext for a wide range of experiments (clinical, chemical, and biological) at different sites across the Atlantic World. The objects of these experiments, the lizards themselves, were sent out in boxes from the very village of Amatitlan, where the lizard cures were first experienced. This paper takes this episode as a point of departure for exploring the status of indigenous practices and beliefs in the making and transmission of natural knowledge in the late eighteenth century Atlantic world. How were the jealously guarded secrets of American Indians turned into reliable scientific facts and artefacts? What was the nature of the exchanges between local healers, creole scholars and European consumers avid for medical cures and curiosities? And how did the "discovery" of such secrets shape cultural and political agendas? At the same time, this paper reflects on the circulation of knowledge in the Spanish Atlantic, beyond the prevailing center/periphery models which have informed the study of Spanish and Spanish American science.

Amy Ackerberg-Hastings (University of Maryland University College)
"The Acknowledged National Standard": Charles Davies, A. S. Barnes, and Textbooks at Teaching Tools
Book historians have recently added a number of dimensions to our understanding of texts in the history of science, including how readers and publishers participate alongside authors in the transmission of knowledge, how patterns of use indicate intellectual reception, and how textbooks communicate scientific ideas to popular audiences. Meanwhile, a forthcoming book suggests that promotion has been at least as important a factor as pedagogical and intellectual superiority in determining which objects have become widely established instruments for teaching mathematics and science. This talk explores the evolution of the textbook into a commercialized teaching tool by concentrating on how the partnership of Charles Davies (1798-1876) and Alfred Smith Barnes (1817-1888) shaped mathematics instruction in the United States. Davies parlayed his reputation as a professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point to defining himself primarily as a producer of textbooks. Barnes, his publisher, organized the books into graded series and utilized aggressive marketing techniques. Together, the men sought to enlarge their audience of American students and laid claim to national status as the standard for the nascent mathematics textbook industry.

Lloyd Ackert (Drexel University)
Biological Thermodynamics: Andrei Famintsyn’s “Exchange of Matter and Transformation of Energy,” 1850-1885
In the late-19th century, a number of botanists, no longer satisfied with “dry systematics” began to apply thermodynamics to the ecological study of plant life. Andrei Sergeevich Famintsyn (1835-1918) adopted this perspective when he organized the first laboratory-based courses in plant physiology at the University of St. Peterburg in Russia. Here he brought together the work of his European colleagues, Felix Hoppe-Seyler and Claude Bernard in general physiology, and that of his Russian mentor Lev Tsenkovskii in microbiology, to develop a novel physiological approach to the study of life. The study of nutrition and respiration led Famintsyn to view nature in holistic unity—for him the organic world was a global economy of matter and energy, in which animals subsisted ultimately on plants, and plants lived on sunlight and the matter found in nature. For him “plants” and “animals” were merely subjective morphological categories for very similar organisms. The proper way to understand the relationships between all organisms was through the exchanges of matter and transformations of energy that occurred between them and their surrounding environments—that is, between the inorganic and organic realms. Famintsyn’s story reflects broader developments in the history of Russian science and in the history of biology. He was part of the Post-Emancipation generation of Russian scientists, who were reform-minded and who completed their training in Western Europe. His work also reflected a broader movement in the history of biology, characterized by the application of organic chemistry to botany, zoology, and microbiology. His thermodynamic perspective provided a foundation for the rise of ecological sciences, such as soil microbiology (Sergei Winogradsky) and symbiogenesis (Merezhkovskii and Lynn Margulis).

Naamah Akavia (University of California Los Angeles)
Subjectivity in Motion: Hermann Rorschach's Inkblot Test and the Motif of Movement in Psychiatry and Aesthetics
My paper will analyze the role of movement in Hermann Rorschach's eponymous inkblot test (1921) and more generally in his theory and practice of psychiatry. Among other ways, Rorschach employed his psycho-diagnostic test to associate an individualized "experience type" with the test-subject's perception of "movement" and "color," when presented with chance inkblots. Relying on unpublished archival material, I will discuss the role of movement in Rorschach's work, and situate it historically and culturally within the discursive contexts of the arts and sciences in the beginning of the twentieth century. The motif of motion will be examined both literally and metaphorically, as it was employed by contemporary psychiatry and aesthetics to introduce novel ways of conceptualizing bodily and psychic experience, and to investigate questions of perception and expression. Discussing the interdisciplinary occupation with movement in an age of increased mechanization, my paper will present two examples of Rorschach's writing on contemporary art: his analysis of the expressionist illustrator Alfred Kubin, and his unpublished manuscript on the psychology of Russian Futurism. These examples will be related to Rorschach's conceptualizations of perception and expression, as well as to his theories of catatonia and schizophrenia, and will illustrate the parallelisms between the creative production and the scientific analysis of dynamic experience, of subjectivity in motion.

Peter Alagona (Harvard University)
Parks for Plants? Endangered Species, the California Desert, and the National Park Service in the 1930s
In the early 1930s, a small group of activists in Southern California set out to establish a new national park in the desert east of Los Angeles for the protection of rare, endemic, and endangered plants subject to an expanding horticultural harvest. If everything went according to plan, this site would become the Desert Plant Area National Park. Yet, after sending an emissary to investigate the region, officials from the National Park Service shunned the proposal. According to agency employees, their mission was to protect the crown jewels of the country’s natural heritage—not a few diminutive flowers and scraggly cacti. After a three-year debate, President Franklin Roosevelt signed legislation protecting the area as Joshua Tree National Monument. During the succeeding decades, however, Park Service officials battled with local botanists and plant conservationists to reduce the Monument’s acreage and redefine its mission. Not until the 1990s, did the agency embrace its role as a guardian of biological diversity, and uphold Joshua Tree as an example of its stewardship. The history of the place formerly known as the Desert Plant Area illustrates the evolution of endangered species and biodiversity conservation in the National Park Service. It also reveals the long struggle between federal bureaucrats and local activists, in their efforts to redefine the agency’s mission and reconcile its often contradictory relationships to science and scenery.

Jason Aleksander (St. Xavier University)
The Legacy of the Copernican Revolution in Light of the Erosion of a Pre-modern Prohibition against the Applicability of Mathematics to the Physical Sciences
In the Western and Islamicate traditions of philosophy and science up to the Renaissance, there seems to have been general agreement, following Aristotle, that the principles of any science of nature could not be articulated mathematically since mathematical statements were understood to be applicable only to things without matter. As a consequence, prior to the Copernican Revolution, the dominant view of astronomy was that, although it provided useful mathematical techniques for “saving the phenomena” of planetary motions, it could not legitimately be considered a natural science of the supra-lunar realm. Thus, interpreted with respect to this pre-modern prohibition against the applicability of mathematical description to the physical sciences, the success of the Copernican Revolution required that the mathematical techniques of astronomy first came to be accepted as legitimate methods for the articulation of principles of the natural motions of supra-lunar objects. Accordingly, in order to discuss the legacy of the Copernican Revolution in light of the pre-modern history of science, this paper will examine how the philosophy of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance accomplished an erosion of the long-held prohibition against the applicability of mathematics to the physical sciences and thereby made possible the success of the Copernican unification of cosmology and astronomy. In relation to this point, the paper will consider not only the importance of Humanist and neo-Platonic aspects of Copernicus’ thought, but will also discuss the key impact of nominalist philosophy’s emphasis on the significance of logical possibility in the articulation of scientific principles.

Jennifer Alexander (University of Minnesota)
Conflating Labor and Leisure: Biomechanics During the Second World War
This paper analyzes the conflation of sports and work during the Second World War, in research aimed at stimulating soldiers’ readiness, and in practices aimed at improving wartime physical fitness and preparedness more generally. It analyzes the use of soldiers and college athletes in the work of American physiologist Ancel Keys, who designed the K-ration for the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, and important analogies between sports and work in the wartime research of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Labor Physiology, which advised the German government on exercise for the health of laborers and of the German people more generally. The paper argues that the Second World War was an important period in the development of biomechanics, shaped by tensions between its deployment as a tool of wartime planning, and its history as tool of individual therapy.

Marcia Allentuck (City University of New York)
The Role of Autobiographical Narrative in the History of Science: The Case of Rita Levi-Montalcini
The autobiography of this distinguished female Italian scientist is revealing in the specific sense as an account of her progress toward major scientific achievement, and also has larger implications regarding how a major scientist presents self and progress toward ultimate achievement. My paper will consider not only Rita Levi-Montalcini but also the wider problem of scientific self presentation in the History of Science.

S. M. Amadae (Ohio State University)
The Prisoner's Dilemma: Normalizing a Post-Modern Political Economy of Exchange?
This paper examines the inherently conflictual concept of exchange that grew up along side the Cold War arms race, both predicated on the game theoretic logic of the Prisoner’s dilemma. Game theory has been used to argue that “trust” is meaningless, and that “consent” is worthless. At the same time that it has been used to fundamentally alter social contract theory, game theory has been advocated as a universal and atemporal theory of human rationality. This paper attempts to come to terms with game theory’s vast impact upon economic theory, and at the same time strives to historicize its claim to being a value-neutral and culturally transcendent social scientific method.

John Anders (University of Pittsburgh)
Projectile Motion and the Mechanical Problems
The questions dealt with in the Mechanical Problems are shown to be problems in the strict Aristotelian sense. This result then serves as motivation for an analysis of Aristotle's remarks on projectile motion in the Physics and for a comparison to the treatment of projectiles in the Mechanical Problems.

Michael Anderson (Peabody Museum of Natural History/Yale University)
Artistic Rigor and Scientific Rigor in James Perry Wilson's Natural History Dioramas
James Perry Wilson never met Carl Akeley, the founding father of the American Museum of Natural History's dioramas, yet he, more than any other diorama artist, embodied Akeley's dictum that the dioramas represent "complete pictures, faultless history, perfect science”. With a Columbia University degree in architecture, Wilson encountered the problems of painting on a curved background with a different viewpoint than the fine artists typically employed. To Wilson, it was a simple matter of using projection geometry to make sure the perspective was accurate; other artists used subjective methods to compensate for distortion with less than perfect results. In ways such as this, Wilson transformed the subjective methodology of diorama background painting into a more objective practice by replacing an emotional and interpretive model with one guided by scientific and supportable references. His partnership on collecting expeditions and close friendship with Dr. Donald Carter, an AMNH mammalogist, insured that Wilson's dioramas were strongly grounded in ecology and the natural sciences. The resulting dioramas by James Perry Wilson are superlative examples of the genre.

Mary Anne Andrei (University of Virginia)
“The Making of a Whale”: Promoting Early Marine Mammal Conservation through Museum Display
Environmental historians traditionally have focused attention on conservationists, such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson, who used the written word to persuade the American public. However, alternative methods of raising public awareness, particularly museum wildlife displays, were undertaken in addition to—and often in concert with—popular writing. Although American natural history museums competed to collect endangered species before they succumbed to extinction, their administrators, curators, and preparators also believed that museums had a “duty to conserve” the species they collected and researched. One of the forgotten conservationists of this period, Frederic A. Lucas, curator of comparative anatomy at the U.S. National Museum, worked at the turn of the century to protect various species of whales brought to the brink of extinction by the international whaling industry. Given the impossibility of photographing whales in the wild, however, the American public had little first-hand knowledge of these animals, making it a challenge for Lucas to rally support for their cause. But if the public could not go to the whale, Lucas resolved to bring the whale to the public. Over a period of months in 1904, he collected a blue whale in Newfoundland, devised a method to create a full cast of the specimen, stripped the carcass to obtain a complete skeleton, and mounted the world’s first accurate glimpse of this remarkable species for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Analysis of this museum display sheds new light on the importance and impact of Lucas’s popular writings on whale conservation.

Rachel Ankeny (University of Adelaide)
Evolving Representations of Stem Cells from the 1960s to the present
This paper examines visual depictions of stem cells over the past 40 years, based on a detailed analysis of the evolution of their representations in both research publications from the biomedical sciences and various popular literatures including textbooks. It explores how key concepts such as totipotency and the use of animal models have been depicted to show how understandings of the definition and activity of stem cells have shifted in recent years and to illustrate ways in which stem cell research practices have changed both as the result of scientific findings and sociopolitical factors.

Peder Anker (University of Oslo)
Science as a Vacation: A History of Ecology in Norway
In the late 1960s the University of Oslo became an influential hotbed for ecologically informed policies and philosophies. The founder of Deep Ecology Arne Næss, the co-author of <i>The Limits to Growth</i> (1972), Jørgen Randers, the Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development Gro Harlem Brundtland, and the famed peace researcher Johan Galtung, were all engaged by ecological scientist in Oslo. This article describes this hitherto largely unknown group of scientists and environmental activists, arguing that these ecological debates grew out of a culture in which nature was understood not as a place of work but in terms of outdoor vacationing. It was the Norwegian participation in the International Biological Programme from 1964 to 1974 which generated debate about the importance of the ecological sciences to alternative living and a more harmonious society. In terms of environmental politics it was a tumultuous period with several highly controversial hydro-electric schemes for harnessing power. The ecologists, cheered by highly vocal students, confronted the policy head-on. Inspired by activist ecologists, a new group of ecophilosophers came to construe nature as an Oriental harmony juxtaposed to the harsh Occidental values of Western capitalism. This was made possible through a series of vacations to Pakistan, India and Nepal by Næss and his students. In the meantime the ecologists hardened their thinking and became increasingly gloomy about how humans should work with nature, as their ideas about ecological harmony evolved from a culture of vacation which saw the land as a place of leisure.

Toby Appel (Yale University)
The Thomsonian Movement, Regular Medicine, and the State in Antebellum Connecticut: A Local Study of a National Phenomenon
The Thomsonian movement, which reached its height in the 1830s, was the first major challenge to the therapies and social and economic standing of the regular medical profession in United States. In the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, several states chartered state medical societies with power to administer a licensing law that placed at least a nominal penalty on practicing without a license. However, in the 1830s and early 1840s, under pressure by exponents of Thomsonianism, legislatures reversed themselves and removed all legal barriers to medical practice. One factor that historians have cited for the Thomsonians’ legislative success was “Jacksonian Democracy.” Historical accounts at the national level leave an impression of the supporters of Thomsonianism as an unruly populist crowd. This episode in medical history has not been described in any detail at the state level--where the drama actually took place-- integrating the perspectives of both the medical regulars and Thomsonian practitioners, the idiosyncrasies of state medical institutions, and state legislative politics. Connecticut is a useful example because, except for New York, its seven-year battle over the medical society’s charter, from 1836 to 1842, was the most protracted in the country. At the state level, one can see much more clearly the nature of Thomsonian practice, the arguments and strategies of both sides; the maneuverings of the legislative debate; and the actual role of political party ideology. While Connecticut may not be entirely typical, this case study illuminates general issues concerning the Thomsonian challenge to orthodox medicine elsewhere.

Rima Apple (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Laboratories and kitchens: Rediscovering hidden sites of scientific work
This paper proposal is part of the proposed session on “The silver anniversary of ‘Women Scientists in America, I,’ 1982-2007: Reception, impact & ramifications for the future,” organized by Pnina Abir-Am. It will focus on two significant contributions of Rossiter’s volume to the history of science. It will disclose how ‘Women Scientists in America’ legitimated new areas of research that have provided vital avenues for enhancing our understanding of the development of science in general and the influence of gender on the development of science in particular. And, it will demonstrate how Rossiter’s work pointed the way to arenas of scientific research that had been previously ignored or derided, demonstrating their importance to how science has been practiced in this country. To do so, the paper will analyze two professions: medicine and home economics. In the former case, it will show how Rossiter’s volume directed attention to the women often buried in the archives as “research associates,” which slighted their contributions to medical studies. In the latter, it will indicate how confining women’s work in a feminized field misled earlier historians who failed to recognize the significant research conducted in fields such as home economics.

William Ashworth (University of Liverpool)
“No Random Walk”: Rationality, Culture, and the British Industrial Revolution
The view that the West industrialised first because it was more rational than the rest of the world has enjoyed a prominent return in recent years. Modernity sprang forth from an “Industrial Enlightenment” driven by a rational culture described by science or at least a “scientific method”. There is no room here for war, taxes, aggressive trade, forceful state intervention and simply unforeseen events. The triumph of reason is the gift of the West to the rest. This is an old argument born primarily of twentieth century Cold War fears, which has returned to centre stage, not in the faded shades of economic and social history, but the revamped colours of cultural history.

Renzo Baldasso (Columbia University)
Regiomontanus's Revolutionary Books
The scientific achievements of Iohann Müller of Königsberg (1436-76), better known as Regiomontanus, are well known, not so his typographic accomplishments and their importance for the reception of his astronomy and for the introduction of mathematical and visual reasoning in early modern science. These latter ones are the subject of my paper. Regiomontanus receives a mention in history of science surveys for completing the revision–the Epitome–of Ptolemy’s Almagest in 1462, and for writing a new commentary on Sacrobosco’s Sphaera (the basic astronomy textbook of the later middle ages.) Historians of science also know that Regiomontanus was a printer and that he had an ambitious program of scientific publications, but that he was unable to actualize it, issuing only five works. However, the astronomer’s books are crucial early incunables, and their graphics make clear that his commitment to reform the mathematical sciences was matched by his typographic novelties. First, his books introduced the printed diagram, setting graphic standards and making figures virtually de rigueur in subsequent scientific publication—-previously, printers had left only blank spaces for them. Regiomontanus was also the first printer to use metal-strips to print lines. In turn, this solution made graphic and typographic precision an issue in printed figures and diagrams. Thus, in spite of being few and modest books, the volumes of the astronomer are important mileposts in the history of the integration of images in early printed scientific and technical books.

Melinda Baldwin (Princeton University)
“Where Are Your Intelligent Mothers?” Marriage and Family in the Scientific Career of Dame Kathleen Lonsdale
Despite being one of the most successful women in twentieth-century British science, the X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Yardley Lonsdale (1903-1971) has received relatively little attention from historians of science. In this paper, based on material from the recently opened Dame Kathleen Lonsdale Papers, I argue that Lonsdale’s scientific career was shaped in particular ways by her identity not just as a woman, but as a married woman and a mother. Although Lonsdale’s husband Thomas was an ardent supporter of her career, in the early 1930s Lonsdale left research temporarily in order to care for her small children. Her desire to work from home during this period, however, led her to pursue one of her most significant scientific projects: the creation of crystallographic reference tables. When interacting with her scientific colleagues, Lonsdale frequently had to confront the assumption that married women should not pursue scientific careers, an attitude shaped by British concerns about reasserting traditional gender roles after the First and Second World Wars. Lonsdale’s own experiences, and those of her graduate students, explain why she chose to focus on issues of marriage and family when she began speaking and writing about women in science during the late 1960s. This examination of Lonsdale’s life indicates that there were unique issues and assumptions facing married female scientists that did not apply to their single counterparts.

Ellen Bales (University of California, Berkeley)
About as Safe as You Make It: Risk, Rhetoric, and Practice in American Uranium Mining, 1950-1970
Between 1951 and 1957, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in a concerted effort to bolster the country’s nuclear arsenal, created an artificial domestic market for uranium. By paying unprecedentedly high prices for ore and encouraging prospectors, mine operators, and miners in the Southwest to participate in a frenetic boom, the AEC underwrote a mining enterprise motivated by profit and characterized by haste, machismo, and high tolerance for danger. Due to high concentrations of carcinogenic radon and radon daughters in the uranium mines, minimal regulation and oversight from federal and state regulatory agencies, and a general disregard for radiation safety on the part of the men themselves, an estimated fifty percent of these miners developed lung cancer within two decades of the boom. This paper explores the clash of perspectives and agendas that resulted when the miners quite understandably prioritized the numerous immediate occupational dangers they faced over the long-term radiation risks the Public Health Service and Bureau of Mines experts warned them against. In a departure from the standard story, in which uranium mine workers’ long-term health was compromised by external, top-down forces over which they had no control (e.g., AEC failures to demand adequate remediation of the radiation hazard in the mines), my interpretation presents a more complicated picture where a conflicting conception of risk and danger on the part of the miners was actively instantiated in mining practice, albeit sometimes with lethal consequences. This paper establishes the relationship between scientific “risk culture” and mining “danger culture,” analyzing in particular the rhetoric that built and maintained a shared ethos within each occupational community. In the case of uranium miners and mine operators, many of whom were working in small, three- or four-man operations and frequently assuming both management and worker roles, their rhetorical strategies and communal understandings of the proper management of risk and danger—which were defined by a focus on autonomy, concern with immediate danger, and suspicion of expertise—became the practice of the uranium mines.

Sultana Banulescu (City University of New York - Graduate Center)
The Vicar of Via Panisperna: Franco Rasetti’s Century-Long Journey from Physics to Paleontology (1901-2001)
This paper aims to offer insight into the creative motivation underlying atomic physicist Franco Rasetti’s mid-life career alternatives. Until his 2001 death, Rasetti (b. 1901) was known as the last surviving key member of Enrico Fermi’s nuclear research group at the University of Rome (“the boys of Panisperna Street”), who patented the chain reaction process. Within the group, Rasetti’s nickname was “Cardinal Vicar” due to his versatility. A naturalized U.S. citizen who left Fascist Italy in 1939, Rasetti declined on moral grounds Fermi’s invitation to join the Manhattan Project, quoting a scientist’s quest for inner, rather than outer motivation. He embarked on a successful second career in Cambrian paleontology and alpine botany, which ran parallel to his lifelong research in particle physics at Laval University and Johns Hopkins. Using archival sources at the American Philosophical Society, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Oral History Project at Caltech, this paper traces Rasetti’s century-long incursion into the origins of life - from one of the eight boys of Panisperna Street to one of the eighty members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences advising the Vatican on scientific, ethical, and environmental issues. Aimed at partially deciphering the honor code of physics by examining Rasetti’s scientific and humanistic creed, this paper explores lesser known facets of his interdisciplinary background, e.g. family tradition in the life and earth sciences as the son of agronomist/entomologist Giovanni Rasetti (1873-1924) and painter/nature observer Adele Galeotti (1870-1972), and the nephew of biochemical pathology professor and alpine climber Gino Galeotti (1867-1921).

Stefan Bargheer (University of Chicago)
The Play of the Eye: The Emergence and Transformation of Ornithology in Great Britain, 1870-1930
The paper investigates the transformation of British ornithology from a classical natural history pursuit to a contemporary life science in the time from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It employs the conceptualization of the relationship between means and ends first formulated in the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey in order to analyze this process of transformation. The core argument is that the means of scientific representation (i.e. the answer to the question “how should we represent nature?”) and the ends of scientific inquiry (i.e. the answer to the question “what do we want to know about nature?”) can neither be empirically separated nor analytically distinguished, but are constituting each other reciprocally in a given course of action and institutional context. British ornithology transformed in an interplay of the means and ends of bird collecting. Initially, birds had been collected with the gun and preserved as mounted specimens in private show-cases and public museums. With the mass-production of binoculars and photo-cameras since the late nineteenth century bird collecting transformed from the accumulation of dead bodies into the production of sight-records and photographic images of living birds. Through the use of these tools the interest ornithologists took in birds gradually transformed. Ornithologists began to turn from the study of the anatomy and classification of dead birds toward the study of bird behavior (ethology) and the relation of birds to their particular environment (ecology) – British ornithology had transformed from natural history to life science.

Lydia Barnett (Stanford University)
"Prophecy and Prediction: The History of the Earth and the Question of the Earth's Future in the Late Seventeenth Century"
The publication of Thomas Burnet’s provocative “Theory of the Earth” (1681-90) was a key moment in the early history of the earth sciences. Fusing together Scriptural and natural knowledge, Burnet offered a comprehensive history of the earth from its creation to its eventual apocalyptic demise. The story has already been told of how Burnet himself became the target of blistering criticism from naturalists and theologians alike. What is less often appreciated is how decisively the so-called ‘Burnet Controversy’ defined the contours of the emerging discipline of earth history. Besides prompting a flurry of new speculations and investigations into the history of the planet, “Theory of the Earth” also shaped the field negatively, by delimiting its scope. In this paper I focus on the contemporary question of the earth’s future as a way of understanding how these debates shaped the development of this new field of natural inquiry. For a brief time, it was a live question whether the study of the earth should interrogate the earth’s future. This fact, I argue, has important implications for our understanding not only of the relationship between science and religion, but also of the process by which things and events were ‘naturalized’ as the new science attempted to extend its explanatory purview across time, space, and other areas of knowledge and learning. That the apocalypse did not become part of the naturalistic study of the earth’s history, while the biblical flood did, signifies two major developments in the field. What the Burnet Controversy decided, contra Burnet, was that the study of the earth would only address the earth’s past and not its future, and that it would be part of natural history rather than natural philosophy. This double turn had significant implications for the development of the earth sciences in the early eighteenth century.

Antonio Barrera (Colgate University)
Mestizo Science and the New Science: The Atlantic World in the 16th and 17th centuries
My research studies the emergence of empirical activities in the Atlantic World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I argue that the commercial and imperial expansion of Spain and England in the Atlantic fostered the development of empirical practices especially in the study of nature. This expansion facilitated interactions between diverse groups (scholars, artisans, merchants, royal officials, and Native Americans) and their respective epistemological practices. From these interactions emerged a tendency towards empiricism and, eventually, the institutionalization of these practices, which came to characterize sixteenth- and seventeenth -century production of natural knowledge in Europe and America.

Mark Barrow (Virginia Tech)
Creating an Inventory of Extinction: The American Committee for International Wild Life Protection and the First Endangered Species List
While the highly publicized declines of the bison, the passenger pigeon, and other species ignited a broad concern about the problem of extinction by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, initially most conservationists in the United States focused exclusively on the threats facing North American wildlife. That narrow focus began broadening in 1930, when the Harvard-trained naturalists Harold J. Coolidge and John C. Phillips launched the American Committee for International Wild Life Protection. A small, informal group whose membership was limited to representatives from a handful of zoological societies, museums, and conservation organizations, the American Committee sought to use the authority of science to further its main objective: “to promote the preservation of rare species in all parts of the world.” To achieve that goal, in the mid-1930s the committee launched an ambitious project to compile a comprehensive inventory of the world’s vanishing species—first of mammals then of birds—that they felt deserved special protection. Given the limited state of knowledge about threatened species at the time, the task turned out to be much more difficult than originally anticipated, and over the next two decades the effort to complete the catalog consumed much of the committee’s time and energy. Nonetheless, the resulting publications—which began appearing in 1943—rank as one of the American Committee’s most enduring legacies; they also served as a model for later, more enduring endangered species lists compiled by the IUCN and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Anja Baumhoff (Loughborough University)
Divisions of labour in art, design, and architecture: the gendered world of the Bauhaus
Modern design and architecture were strongly promoted by the Bauhaus, the famous German art school of the 1920s. Its program promised to treat men and women equally in a context where gender relations had been considerably transformed by World War One and the new democratic constitution in Germany. Despite this promising start, the school went back to conventional divisions of labour. Since the Bauhaus promoted ideas, values, and aesthetical concepts of modernism both in Europe and world wide, its inherent gender message had a broad influence in maintaining conventional gender relations. Gender concepts were an integral part of modernism and influenced fine art, design and architecture deeply. By looking at relevant examples of Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten and their female disciples like Alma Buscher and Gunta Stölzl this paper will analyse the thoughts and motives behind the gender divisions, and examine its impact, the arguments, mentalities, and reactions of the male and female Bauhäusler to it. It thus extends the argument put forward in the early 1980s on the gendered division of labour in science, by Rossiter’s Women Scientists in America, I, to the domains of design and architecture.

Alexander Bay (Chapman University)
The Vitamin Revolution in Japan: Beriberi, Chinese Medicine, and the Cultural Construction of Ignorance
In modern Japan, beriberi afflicted the Emperor, the military and the working class. Navy physicians, theorizing that a protein deficiency caused beriberi, eliminated the disease from the fleet by replacing a portion of the white rice diet with barley in 1886. Tokyo University doctors denounced this theory because of its affiliation with Chinese medicine or “kanpo” practices. “Kanpo” doctors forbade beriberi patients to eat white rice and in its place prescribe barley to be eaten along with “materia medica” formulas. University doctors believed the disease was contagious and focused on finding the causal bacillus. In 1913, based on abundant experimental data, the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine conference concluded that a diet deficiency caused beriberi. Tokyo University members, however, continued to discount the diet-theory and defended the germ theory etiology. Yamashita Seizo argues, “Even at this conference in Southeast Asia, where beriberi was pronounced a deficiency disease…[university doctors]…continued to be the symbol of last resistance.” Echoing the tenants of Kuhnian revolutions, he continues, “For the science [of vitamins] to be generally accepted in Japan, dissensions and time were necessary.” (“Kakke no rekishi: Bitamin no hakken”, 330-31) Drawing upon the field of agnotology, the study of the cultural construction of ignorance, my paper challenges the paradigm shift narrative by arguing that there was no vitamin revolution in Japan, but rather the destruction of a network maintained by elite doctors who used their institutional authority to spread doubt and uncertainty concerning the vitamin theory and the role of diet in beriberi etiology.

Jennifer L. Bazar (York University)
Patient Treatment after Death: The Controversial Practice of Post-Mortem Exams at the Toronto Asylum, 1841-1900
It is “utterly useless, expensive and absurd” (Meredith, 1863, n.p.). Such was the opinion of Inspector Meredith on the practice of mandatory post-mortem exams at the Toronto Asylum. In contrast his colleague, Inspector Nelson, commended the Medical Superintendent and suggested that the knowledge gained through the practice would benefit the treatment of insanity positively (Nelson, 1862). For the majority of individuals confined as patients at the Toronto Asylum in the nineteenth century, this conflict of opinion was of no concern; their treatment ceased at the moment their discharge papers were signed. But for the handful of individuals who passed away each year within the confines of the Asylum’s walls, patient life continued into the afterlife. This paper will explore the debate surrounding post-mortem examinations carried out on patients at the Toronto Asylum to the end of the nineteenth century. Resources will be derived mainly from primary sources located at the Archives of Ontario including reports of the Legislative Assembly, the Medical Superintendents, and the Board of Inspectors as well as several articles appearing in the popular press of the time. References: Meredith, E.A. (1863). Separate report of Mr. E.A. Meredith for the year 1862. Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 8th Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 22, Sessional Papers no. 66. Archives of Ontario, Microfilm B41, Reel 47. Nelson, W. (1862). Separate report of Mr. Wolfred Nelson for the year 1861. Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, 7th Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 20, Sessional Papers no. 32. Archives of Ontario, Microfilm B41, Reel 45.

Ari Belenkiy (Bar-Ilan University)
Groping Toward Linear Regression Analysis:Newton’s Analysis of Hipparchus’ Equinox Observations
Newton, in designing a new calendar contained in the manuscripts known as MS Yahuda 24 and analyzed in our recent article in Notes Rec Royal Soc Lond (59 (3), Sept 2005, pp. 223-54), attempted to compute the length of the tropical year using the ancient equinox observations reported by Hipparchus of Rhodes. Though Newton had a very thin sample of data, he obtained a tropical year only a few seconds longer than the correct length. We show that the reason lies in Newton’s application of a technique similar to the modern ordinary least squares method. Newton also had a clear understanding of qualitative variables. Open historico-astronomical problems related to inclination of the Earth’s axis of rotation are discussed. In particular, ignorance about the long-range variation in inclination and nutation is likely responsible for the wide variety in the lengths of the tropical year assigned by different 17th century astronomers – the problem that led Newton to Hipparchus.

Alice Bell (Imperial College, London)
The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm: the Maturing Image of Science in 20th Century Juvenile Literature
This paper considers the ways in which images of science are both distanced from and associated with images of the child. Jacqueline Rose (“The Case of Peter Pan,” 1994) contrasts scientific expertise with Romantic ideas of the child as innately knowledgeable of the natural world. As example, she describes a 1970s Alan Garner child-character who shuns 'book learning' for a simpler, unmediated 'reading' of stone. We can see a similar distinction between children's naivety and the learned expertise of science reflected in educational discourses (albeit worked the other way around, to privilege science). In contrast, images of childlike innocence can be associated with science: Newton ‘playing at the seashore’, Einstein as ‘a little child entering a huge library' or Roslynn D. Haynes’s (1994) ‘stupid virtuosos’. Similar to Garner's characters, childlike science provides the profession with a special curiosity, relationship with nature, or detachment from social consequence. This paper discusses the duel image of science (one both childlike and beyond childhood) through a reading of Norman Hunter's 'Professor Branestawm' books. Contrasting 1930s Branestawm with 1950s and 1980s articulations of the character, we see a scientist starting off childlike but ‘maturing’ over time. Particularly interesting are the ways his relationships with non-scientific social actors change over the century. I will also briefly discuss images of science, nature and the child in “His Dark Materials, Uncle Albert, Horrible Science” and “Narnia”.

Avner Ben-Zaken (Harvard Society of Fellows)
Bridging Networks of Trust: Practicing Astronomy in Late Sixteenth Century Salonika
In the late sixteen century European and Islamic practitioners of natural philosophy were experiencing a shift in the cultural hegemony over the field of astronomy. The medieval Arabic astronomical texts were cultivated in Europe and generated new theories and observations. Peuerbach and Regiomontanus in the late fifteen century and then Copernicus, shifted the centers of astronomy from East to the West. In the Islamic world, practitioners of astronomy distrusted and ignored these new astronomical writings and kept fidelity to their medieval traditions. Two networks of trust, Islamic and European, that were kept separate became an obstacle for exchange of theories and observation’s data. However, in late 16th century Salonika, Jews from Spain and Italy, who fled the persecutions of the inquisition and who were versed in Latin and European natural philosophical writings, bridged this cultural gap by translating the works of Peuerbach and Regiomontanus from Latin into Hebrew. My paper will show that the translators were not only versed in intellectual agendas, but also were in close connection to the Ottoman chief astronomer and to the Ottoman prime minister. I will, therefore, argue that cultural gaps of trust could be bridged by a third side and by personal connection that made these “culturally untrustworthy” texts available to Islamic practitioners.

Etienne Benson (MIT)
Field Research in the Public Eye: Tagging Whales Before and After the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972
The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 posed an epistemological problem for marine mammal researchers in the United States. Long dependent on catch data provided by whaling and other extractive industries, closely tied to zoological parks and aquariums, often funded by Navy bioacoustics and marine mammal training programs, scientists found themselves suddenly hemmed in by new institutional oversight bodies, an increasingly scandal-oriented press, and growing animal rights and environmentalist movements. Research that required capturing, marking, or killing marine mammals became much more difficult. At the same time, the MMPA and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 made new sources of funding available for field research. In this paper I show how scientists reacted to these pressures and opportunities through the history of radio-tagging, a field technique that was adapted for cetacean research between the 1960s and the 1980s. Radio-tagging depended on technical innovations, such as the development of barbed radio-darts that could be fired into a whale by shotgun, and on the support of increasingly influential advocacy groups, such as the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, that were often skeptical of hands-on research. The history of public and private debates over the use of this technique to study bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean in the 1970s and 1980s provides insight into the impact of the popular environmental movement on field biologists' research practices.

Thomas Berez (The Johns Hopkins University)
Between Pure and Applied Science: Georg Vogelpohl as a Case Study of the Rehabilitation of German Science after the Second World War
The experiences of German scientists and engineers in the immediate post-World War II period are a topic that has just begun to garner the attention of historians of science and historians proper. Like the German population at large, and perhaps even to a greater extent, scientific and technological experts in immediate post-War period faced an uncertain future. Faced with the realities of denazification, the taking of “reparations” material by the Allied occupiers, and the professional compromising by victors who were skeptical of allowing any scientific or technological work which could serve to remilitarize the Germans, scientists and engineers faced a professionally precarious situation perhaps unlike any other they had previously experienced. Indeed, it seems a forgone conclusion that those individuals who were able to resurrect their research and other such professional activities from the ruins of the Third Reich were successful largely because of their ability to cater to the demands of the Allied occupiers. Furthermore, by selling their science in a manner that not only allayed fears of a remilitarized Germany, but also by responding to the rising tensions between the Western occupiers (France, Britain, and the U.S.), such professionals could play an important role in German science and technology’s rehabilitation and recalibration into the emerging Cold War world order. This paper is a case study demonstrating how the larger issue of post-War German rehabilitation and reconstruction evolved within a scientific and technological context, and how the classification of an individual’s professional work as either “basic” or “applied” can be constructed within the dynamic milieu of the Second World War’s aftermath.

Carin Berkowitz (Cornell University)
Pedagogical Cultures and Physiological Practice: Educational Institutions and Research Methodology in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain
In the early nineteenth century, the epicenter of British medical education shifted from Edinburgh to London as research and education in the British capital moved from small, private institutions to large, all-encompassing schools. At the same time, research practices in the biological sciences changed as vivisection became more widely accepted and the argument from design began to lose momentum. These changes in methodology were tied to the classroom--medical periodicals reveal a community obsessed with the restructuring of education as central to scientific reform. The sense that the British medical sciences were falling behind those of their continental rivals provided some of the impetus for change, but proposed solutions and the politics of those solutions were varied. Although radicals like Thomas Wakley, founder of The Lancet, proposed that British medical education and research be refashioned after the French model, in which experimental physiology was developed in centralized institutions, many who were themselves educated under the old system advocated a less drastic overhaul. One such reformer, Sir Charles Bell, former proprietor of one of London’s private anatomy schools and London University’s most famous early recruit, promoted institutional reform while at the same time advancing a more deeply rooted methodological model that avoided vivisection and was based in traditional British surgical education in anatomy. As I will contend here, such debates about the structure and content of British medical education shaped the research priorities and practices of British biological sciences as they developed at the beginning of the Victorian period.

Nikhil Bhattacharya (Retired)
Galileo's Mathematical Physics in Its University and Military Contexts
The Book of Nature, Galileo insisted, was written in the language of mathematics. This belief was not acquired from his university teachers. The Aristotelian curriculum was unequivocally clear: mathematics – meaning geometry – did not apply to changeable nature but only to the eternal orbits of heavenly bodies. As a matematico, Galileo’s conflating geometry with physics would provoke outrage from Aristotelian faculties at Pisa and Padova. Galileo’s unusual predicament came from his conversion to a new and different mathematical tradition, that of military engineers like Commandino and Tartaglia. This alternate tradition, centered around fortification geometry (a result of the artillery revolution), was developed among the warrior elite in baroque Italy outside of the universities. While university matematici taught a four-course sequence in geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy, and astrology for medical students, the courtly military mathematical tradition that Galileo learned from Ricci and Del Monte followed Euclid with Archimedes. As university professore Galileo was officially the teacher of the astrological mathematics sequence, while moonlighting as a private tutor in military engineering to noblemen. Galileo’s troubles with the universities arose from a problem inherited from Tartaglia: charting the curve of cannonball trajectories, thus crossing the Aristotelian divide, applying geometry to mundane movement. At Padova, Galileo succeeded in demonstrating that the trajectory was parabolic. This discovery would ultimately become the exemplar of his nuova scienza, despite enduring university opposition. Mathematical physics arose from this clash of subcultures, between the military aristocracy and the universities. This paper examines Galileo’s institutional and intellectual role in the conflict.

Adam Biggs (Claflin University)
New Negro Doctors, Old Negro Quacks: Medical Legitimacy and the Problem of Race, 1895-1940
This paper examines how early-twentieth century African-American physicians used the construct of the New Negro to legitimate their status as modern professionals and regulate the actions of their African-American colleagues. Although the trope of the New Negro emerged primarily in late-nineteenth century public discourse surrounding African-American civic progress, African-American physicians also applied this construct within their ranks as a means to affirm their professional distinction. Examining racial anthologies and articles from the <i>Journal of the National Medical Association</i> (the African-American counterpart to the <i>Journal of the American Medical Association</i>), my paper illustrates how organized black doctors adopted a distinctive set of manners and mores, based largely on Victorian standards of respectability, designed to challenge popular stereotypes of racial inferiority and assert their status as legitimate medical practitioners. In these efforts to affirm professional distinction, I argue, African-American physicians also used the New Negro as a means to regulate the behavior of their colleagues and to elevate themselves within their ranks. More than documenting the historical efforts of African-American physicians to limit quackery, my paper performs a close reading of journal articles, professional treatises, and the by-laws of black medical associations, including works by Charles Roman, Algernon Jackson, and Louis T. Wright, to expose the underlying impetus behind these symbolic texts as an attempt, not simply to limit illicit practices, but also to establish a hierarchy within the African-American medical profession based on racially coded notions of progress and respectability.

Ann Blair (Harvard University)
Early Modern Teaching Through the Lens of Student Notes
I will examine examples of the teaching of natural philosophy in early modern universities from student notes, either surviving in manuscript or as printed after the death of the professor. These cases reveal that a wider variety of topics was taught than was called for by university regulations, including some treatments of "new" science and that extracurricular teaching was particularly innovative. I will survey the kinds of student notes which survive, including marginal annotations in printed books, free-standing manuscripts written under dictation and textbooks copied out by students. I will examine the pedagogical theories and practical circumstances that favored various kinds of note-taking, using examples especially from early 17th-century Paris and late 17th-century Harvard.

Victor Boantza (University of Toronto)
Particles and Solvents: Debating Analytical Chemistry and Elemental Theories at the Early Royal Parisian Academy of Sciences
Samuel Cottereau Duclos (1598-1685) established the laboratory and the (al)chemical research program at the newly inaugurated Parisian Academy of Sciences (est. 1666). In the years following his prestigious election, Duclos was among most active founder-members and enjoyed an unmatched level of influence within the royal institute. By the mid 1670s, however, Duclos’ status and influence had weakened markedly. The origins of this institutional power decline are interpreted in light of Duclos’ programmatic preference of solution chemistry over the traditional distillation practices, highlighted by his research into Alkahest, the archetypical Universal Solvent. The assessment reveals metaphysical contentions within the Academy concerning the nature of matter as well as the scope and essence of chemical analysis. An institutional turning point in such disputes is marked by Duclos’ confrontation with the younger Denis Dodart, an avid defender of distillation processes. Duclos’ resistance against what he perceived as the unwarranted mechanistic reductionism of Cartesian and Boylean thought was at odds with the precepts of an increasingly mechanist-learned community. Drawing on Paracelsian and Helmontian notions, Duclos advanced a vitalistic-corpuscular cosmology, claiming the superiority of solvents over fire analysis as the ultimate analytic tool. The contextualization of this commitment to solution analytic chemistry sheds light on the ways by which these debates negotiated the distinction between Chemical Philosophy and the ascending Mechanical Philosophy or the ‘chemical’ and the ‘physical’, respectively. We are thus offered insights into some of the most striking as well as most problematic relations between two research traditions, set apart by the Scientific Revolution.

Patrick Boner (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
A Scholar and a Statesman: Hans Georg Herwart von Hohenburg as a Critic and Patron of Johannes Kepler
Hans Georg Herwart von Hohenburg was not only a prominent Bavarian statesman, but a scholar of great distinction. Highly respected by the Bavarian aristocracy as an effective intermediary during the final turbulent years of the reign of Duke Wilhelm V and the emergence of his successor, Maximilian I, Herwart was also acknowledged for his accomplishments in astronomy, chronology, mathematics and philology. His endeavours in chronology earned him the admiration of such intellectuals as Michael Mästlin, who commended his “extraordinary industry”, and his efforts in mathematics proved fundamental to the early formulation of logarithms by Jöst Bürgi and John Napier. As a person of political prestige and intellectual prominence, Herwart stood at the centre of a scholarly correspondence network including the likes of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Prätorius, Helisaeus Röslin and Johannes Kepler. In the following presentation, I focus on the origins and evolution of Herwart’s correspondence with Kepler, 1597–1611. From an initial chronological query communicated by Herwart to Kepler in 1597, an exchange of more than ninety letters ensued. Through his correspondence, Herwart provided not only a link to the larger intellectual community, but a platform for the unpolished expression of Kepler’s ideas. By constantly urging Kepler to re-examine his ideas in the face of critical doubts, Herwart encouraged his correspondent to solidify his most fundamental convictions. I suggest that Herwart’s sceptical attitude towards Kepler’s astrology proved especially elucidating, urging Kepler to articulate in a series of letters the archetypal principles underlying his worldview.

Luciano Boschiero (Campion College, Australia)
Giovanni Borelli and the 1664-1665 Comet: a Prelude to His Celestial Mechanics
When Giovanni Borelli spotted a bright comet in December 1664, he got to work on determining its trajectory. At that time, theories about cometary movements in relation to the supposed mobility of the earth excited Copernican astronomers aiming to either prove or disprove Tycho’s geo-heliocentric and geostatic system. Borelli’s work on this topic adds much to our understanding of the astronomical and natural philosophical issues at stake during the mid to late seventeenth century. Despite his belief in a heliocentric system, Borelli decided to avoid discussing whether the comet proved the mobility of the earth. Instead, as manuscript and published sources suggest, he focused on using his cometary theory as the basis for a mathematical and mechanistic explanation of the behaviour of celestial bodies.

Dan Bouk (Princeton University)
The Scientific Valuation of American Lives: Mathematicians and the Foundations of a Commercial Society
The mid-nineteenth century saw the advent of a new conception of American society. Though it would be nearly a century before population statistics indicated that the United States had transitioned from being a predominantly rural, agricultural society to one dominated by cities, commerce, and industry, already in the decades immediately preceding the Civil War newly powerful corporations were preparing the way for such a shift. In place of the dominant modes of American social science, which depended on ideas of American exceptionalism premised on the promise of an unprecedented frontier or the extra-historical narrative of millennial Christianity, a few mathematicians working with the officers of the largest life insurance company in the US developed a means of thinking about American society that was uniquely fitted to the needs of commercial expansion. Founded on the ideal of the merchant as the representative American and constructed out of numerical techniques borrowed from the exact sciences, these mathematicians made the first attempt at a scientific valuation of American lives. In the process they turned the mortality experience of the Mutual of New York into a kind of Humboldtian, precision tool for mapping the health of a vast continent.

Alexander Boxer (MIT)
Following the Field Lines: Lingering Images of a Mechanical Aether and the Discovery of Magneto-Hydrodynamic Waves
Certain visualizations, intended at one time to be metaphorical only, can be dusted-off and given new interpretations by later thinkers. Moreover, unexpected advances may arise expressly because an image’s precise meaning is in a state of flux. Just this sort of ambiguity led to a discovery of fundamental importance in understanding the physics of the solar system: magneto-hydrodynamic waves. Though received with skepticism for many years, the theoretical prediction of these waves by Hannes Alfven would eventually be rewarded with a Nobel Prize. As originally conceived by Alfven in 1942, magneto-hydrodynamic waves in a plasma were to be thought of as magnetic field lines made to vibrate like strings under tension. I argue that in Alfven’s original account there is a subtle shift of agency in the problem from the physical entity (the magnetic field) to its visualization (the magnetic field lines). In order to accomplish this, in order to ascribe a ‘tension’ to the field lines themselves, Alfven invoked, “the usual mechanical picture of electrodynamical phenomena,” even though Einstein had rendered all such mechanical pictures obsolete in 1905. Alfven also provided a second, purely mathematical derivation of magneto-hydrodynamic waves which is devoid of any reference to field lines. In this paper, I will show how the role played by the field-line visualization altered as the idea of magneto-hydrodynamic waves moved from discovery to justification to pedagogy.

Emily Brock (Georgia State University)
‘What is Industrial Forestry?’ Pushing the Boundaries of Forest Science in the Interwar Years
The alliance of American scientific forestry with the twentieth-century lumber industry might seem to be a natural fit. However, the employment of professional foresters in industrial settings in fact provoked a storm of protest within academic forestry. The largest American lumber companies realized the need for scientific expertise in the maintenance of their forest operations as early as the 1910s, although it was not until the middle 1920s that industrial forestry became widely accepted. Spurred by the economic depression and the demands of the New Deal, state and federal regulators demanded the lumber companies stabilize their industry by maintaining the health of their Northwest forest holdings and providing for the recovery of land following logging. Industry responded to these new requirements by hiring professionally trained foresters to oversee their operations, opening a third avenue of employment for a profession once focused solely on academic and government. Some of the most prominent forest scientists questioned the validity of the concept of industrial forestry altogether. Scientific foresters employed by industry were faulted for a shortsighted focus on lumber yield and for a lack of both inventiveness and objectivity. Furthermore, the resulting period of criticism and intense self-examination by the leading foresters of the era led to lasting insight into the meaning of forestry as a part of the lumber industry, as a scientific field, and as a socially meaningful activity. This marks the beginnings of a split between those who accepted logging as a part of the forests they studied, and those who focused on wild forests.

Joan Bromberg (Johns Hopkins University)
New Instruments and the Meaning of Quantum Mechanics
What role did new scientific instrumentation play in the resurgence of interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics that took place in the second half of the twentieth century? This paper makes an oblique, rather than a frontal, attack on this question. It looks at two 1980s experiments on complementarity, one suggested by a champion of Bohr’s ideas, and the other by an enemy of them. The first experiment resulted from John Archibald Wheeler's promotion of delayed choice experiments. The second came from Jean-Pierre Vigier's ideas for “Einweg” experiments for the neutron interferometer: that is, experiments to show that the neutron has a definite trajectory through this apparatus, even as it manifests wave-like behavior. I end with suggestions for broadening these cases studies so as to disentangle some of the social, intellectual and instrumental causes for the spurt in foundations research.

Julie Brown (National Museum of American History-Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio)
Displaying Health and Medicine to the Public: The Exposition, the Museum, and the Exhibition in the Early Progressive Era
With the challenge facing medical officials and professionals to connect the public to the changing views of modern health, the opportunities that emerged for this purpose were the exposition, museum, and exhibition. Each of these forums presented a distinct, but sometimes, overlapping set of conditions for the displaying of health and medicine. This paper will examine and compare these conditions in three representative examples beginning with the St. Louis Exposition (1904), the Chicago Municipal Museum (1906), and the 1908 Tuberculosis Exhibition (American Museum of Natural History). In all three of these events there was an awareness and exploitation of the new visual culture for display. Reshaping ideas and information on health and medicine for display was essentially a re-presentational process, one that involved the creation, imagining, fabricating, and implementation of specific visual strategies. A discussion will address how the information on health issues was translated into exhibit form since this was a key dilemma for all exhibitors. Despite the harnessing of such a rich toolbox of conventional as well as innovative display devices, the gap between reality and its representation remained challenging territory. This underlying conflict in reducing the complex information on health issues for display will be examined. This work is based on extensive research drawn from primary sources in archival, library, and museum collections and draws on materials that are currently part of a manuscript in progress.

Tatjana Buklijas (University of Cambridge)
Orthopaedic surgery, the mechanical body and the empire in the late-nineteenth century Vienna
Viennese surgery of the late nineteenth century is best known for Theodor Billroth, his invasive abdominal procedures and his German nationalism, yet the city was also home to an important orthopaedic school whose research, educational and national politics were significantly different. The aim of this paper is to show how the socio-political environment and the local disciplinary traditions informed the development of a surgical discipline and of a distinct surgical body. I study the career of the surgeon Johann von Dumreicher (1815-80) and his students, as well as the medical research and orthopaedic practice at the military medical-surgical school, university and city hospitals, to uncover resources upon which this school drew in its early days. What were the connections, I ask, between mechanical anatomy at the military academy, demands for a more practically oriented medical education, conservative national politics and orthopaedic surgery?

Thomas Burnett (University of California Berkeley)
Developing a Story of Life in Göttingen: Interpreting the Succession of Biotic Forms in the Fossil Record, 1800-1830
At the center of my project is a core group of closely interacting figures, composed of an inspirational mentor, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), and four celebrated students: Ernst Schlotheim (1764-1832), Karl von Hoff (1771-1837), Leopold von Buch (1774-1853), and Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). My study will demonstrate how these naturalists developed a means of constructing a more robust sense of the earth’s history, one in which plants, animals, humans, and Providence played unpredictable and interconnected roles. With my geographical focus in Göttingen, I will also explore the way in which the study of history of the earth was seen as a humanistic endeavor, one in which the techniques and methodologies of classical studies informed natural scientific practice.

Victoria Cain (American Academy of Arts and Sciences)
Where Have All the People Gone?: Erasing the Human Presence in Habitat Dioramas
From the 1890s up through the 1940s, American natural history museums built elaborate habitat dioramas. These dioramas provide windows into the changing ideas of natural history and wilderness in this period. In the early part of the century, many habitat dioramas contained traces of human presence--glimpses of fishermen or farms in the background paintings, the rail of a ship at sea, footprints of hunters. By the 1940s, however, the human presence in habitat dioramas had been erased. Dioramas depicted pristine settings, ostensibly undisturbed by humans. In this paper, I will argue that this shift encapsulates the changing mission of natural history museums in the 20th century. Museums initially defined "natural history" in terms of human relations to nature, but redefined the term to exclude these relations. By the 1930s and 1940s, museum dioramas proposed a new, preservationist vision of the natural world and the history that sought to describe it--a vision largely at odds with the goals of museums' industrialist founders and conservationist supporters.

Ronald Calinger (Catholic University of America)
Leonhardo Eulero: Academia Petropolitanae
Except for major discoveries in his scientific research, Euler’s second St. Petersburg period from 1766 is little known. Using correspondence of the time, diaries of others, and the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences’ nearly lost <i>Protocols</i>, this paper examines his reception by Catherine the Great, his unsuccessful attempt to gain freedom for the operation of the academy, his major contributions to integral calculus and to astronomy with his second lunar theory, his Letters to a German Princess his near total loss of sight, his second ship theory, how the research circle that formed around him conducted their studies, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova’s honoring of him at her inauguration as director of the academy, and Nicholas Fuss’ eulogy.

Lino Camprubi
Coal, Concrete and Design: Engineering and Political Economy in Authoritarian Spain circa 1953
When the Instituo de la Construcción y del Cemento moved to its new building in 1953 a huge coal silo dominated the landscape and the entrance to the laboratory. It was shaped as a dodecahedron and was made of concrete. The world famous structural engineer Eduardo Torroja, director of the Instituto, justified the choice of this design by both economic and aesthetic reasons. I will look at it as the very embodiment of political economy in Franco’s Spain. For that matter, I will focus on three different aspects of the dodecahedral silo: on the role of coal and cement for Spanish autarkic economy; on the shape of the tank and its function as a canonical icon within the landscape constructed for the Instituto; and on its output to the Instituto as part of an industrialization project related to the colonization of the country by industrialized dams and cheap housing. I will argue that the relation of these three different aspects of the coal silo placed it as a mediator between Spain’s authoritarian political economy, design and industrialization. Thus, the Instituto's coal silo became an active part of one of the projects among the available alternatives for early Franco's political economy.

Jimena Canales (Harvard University)
From Lab to Disco: A Short History of the Strobe
In the 20th century, scientists used the stroboscope to negotiate the boundary between reality and illusion. Harold "Doc" Edgerton, professor at MIT and author of famous photographs of bullets in mid-flight and of half-exploding exploding balloons, is widely considered to be the main scientist who developed the technology. Yet strobe lights were often used and improved outside of Edgerton's Lab. From its military applications to its peace-time use with bubble chambers, it revealed a host of new macroscopic and microscopic phenomena, leading scientists and philosophers, including Gaston Bachelard, to rethink notions of time and space. The stroboscope also changed the meaning of what it meant to observe. Stark changes in the definition of observation appeared when William Grey Walter, famous for his work on cybernetics and robots, started to investigate the living brain by analyzing how it was affected by staring into a stroboscope. When his work was taken up by other neurophysiologists who furthered investigated links between stroboscopic flicker effects, epilepsy, and mescaline-induced hallucinations, new theories of perception were developed to account for these connections. These new theories had repercussions beyond science, when writers ranging from Aldous Huxley to William Burroughs wrote about the relation of science and art, and reality and illusion, by reference to the stroboscope. Along with rethinking the meaning of observation, others rethought reading and writing practices. In the 1970's Gilles Deleuze advocated a new type of writing called "écriture stroboscopique" that produced a "livre-drogue" whose hybrid meanings changed depending on the speed of reading.

David Cantor (National Institutes of Health)
When Experts Disagree: Public Trust and the 1997 Controversy over Routine Mammography for Healthy Women in their 40s
In 1996 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a consensus development conference (CDC) to reexamine a controversial 1993 decision to cease recommending routine mammography for women in their 40s. A review of new data from Swedish randomized trials suggested a statistically significant reduction in mortality for women in this age group who underwent mammography. However, the CDC panel reported in 1997 that the available data did not warrant a single recommendation for mammography for all women in their 40s: Each woman should decide for herself whether to undergo mammography in consultation with her physician. The recommendation was greeted with uproar. Critics accused the panel of confusing and killing women, and the resulting controversy divided the major cancer agencies, prompted Congressional investigations, and dominated media health reports for many weeks. Each year millions of women in their 40s had to decide whether to undergo a mammography, and thousands of physicians relied on information provided by the cancer agencies to advise their patients. But, with experts divided, all stakeholders in the issue had to decide which evidence, which experts, and which institutions to trust. This paper explores the questions raised by this controversy for the credibility of scientific knowledge about mammography screening, the NIH consensus development program, and the cancer agencies involved in the debate.

James Capshew (Indiana University)
Portraits of the Sex Researcher: The Cultural Production of Kinsey
After Alfred C. Kinsey’s death in 1956, his scientific work was left in other hands, notably at the Institute of Sex Research at Indiana University, now the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Evaluations of his work and assessments of his life have continued, marked by a series of biographical studies that have taken account both of the public face he tried to create and the disclosure of his secret, spectacular sex life. The goal of this paper is to explore these biographies in their historico-cultural contexts, arguing that the complex relation among the biographical subject, the biographer and their audiences produced disparate versions of Kinsey’s life and work and their connections. Appearing over the last third of a century, these biographical studies have portrayed Kinsey as a scientific hero-martyr, a flawed but brilliant co-worker, a depraved bisexual who distorted his scientific findings, or a humane researcher who was fueled by an unusually strong sex drive. More recently, Kinsey has been the focus in films (in both documentary form and feature presentation), historical fiction, and an entry in the new Dictionary of Scientific Biography. The authors of these works have had varying amounts of scientific training and literary skill, but they all attempted to produce narratives that spoke to the culture they found themselves in. Exploring the hows and the whys of the cultural production of Kinsey biographies provides a useful tool for historians to understand the human element in science.

Michael Carhart (Old Dominion University)
The Two Networks that Brought Blumenbach That Georgian Skull (and other curiosities from Göttingen, 1775-1806)
The story of the Georgian refugee's skull, which J. F. Blumenbach made the keystone of his five-fold racial taxonomy in the late eighteenth century, is well known. A refugee of the Russo-Turkish war of 1772, a woman of remarkable beauty made her way to Moscow where she died young of disease. In death she was more useful to scientists than in life: her head was removed from her body, the skull stripped of flesh by a physician named Hildebrandt, who sent it to Catherine the Great's surgeon general at St. Petersburg, G. T. von Asch. A student of Albrecht von Haller, Asch forwarded the skull to his alma mater, Göttingen, which is how Blumenbach, then working on his dissertation, got it. Over the next thirty years, Asch sent to Göttingen dozens of curiosities pertaining to the natural history and human history of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia. In the early nineteenth century, Blumenbach built the University's ethnological museum around the Asch collection (as well as a set of artifacts donated by the Forsters from their voyage to the Pacific with Capt. Cook). In addition to the artifacts, Asch annotated those items in about 120 letters, which are now housed in the University archive. I will spend the summer 2007 working with those letters and artifacts in an attempt to reconstruct two scientific networks that were linked through the person of Asch: a network of explorers, diplomats, and missionaries out on the Russian frontiers; and a network of sedentary scientists in western Europe who systematized the data collected by the explorers. This talk will summarize that research.

Elizabeth Cavicchi (MIT)
Microscopy as a Collective Act Involving Later Observers with Historical Work
The microscopist’s eye is often portrayed as solitary – binocular at most. However, a ‘collective’ aspect of microscopy emerges from relations linking observers. Seventeenth-century microscopist Robert Hooke invited readers to follow along and observe. Their participation constituted a ‘collective act’, in the sense discerned by Shapin and Schaffer in the air pump experiments of Hooke’s colleague, Robert Boyle. This paper explores the ‘collective act’ of microscopy through four examples where participants – including myself, my teachers and student -- work later than the investigators whose microscopes and writings we use and discuss. In one example, Peter Heering engaged me and two others with observing images projected by an eighteenth century solar microscope; projection facilitated interactions among participants and images,. Another example traces responses to Hooke’s Micrographia in a 1960s microscope curriculum for children, a student workshop taught by Philip and Phylis Morrison that I attended, and their collaboration with the Eames Office on a film (1968, 1977) depicting travel through spatial ‘powers of ten’, based on Kees Boeke’s 1957 picture book. In another example, MIT Museum’s 2006-7 exhibit of historical single lens microscopes provokes instrumental and observational activities by me and an undergraduate. A last example involves contemporary laser strobe microscopy whose nanosecond-spaced images are composited as digital video for later and remote viewing. In these examples, observers re-engage microscopy across time, interrelating through historical inquiry, teaching and learning as well as observational science. As the historical microscopist’s eye is joined by others, their collective activity remains generative, being enriched by the newcomers’ experiences.

Kevin Chang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
Languages and Translation of Scientific Knowledge: The Introduction of Medical Dissertations to the Popular Book Market in Early Modern Germany
This paper studies the phenomenon of large-scale translations of medical dissertations to German in the first third of the eighteenth century, the first of its kind. The dissertation as a genre of academic writing and publication was as a rule written in Europe's academic language, Latin, well into the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1710s, medical dissertations were translated to German in large numbers through the systematic effort of some publishers. Their translation efforts reveal that increasingly there was a sizable German-reading market for medical knowledge originally presented in academic venues. It was a readership that no longer considered reading in Latin mandatory or favorable, and its size apparently was great enough to sustain the effort. The relationship between the academic and the vernacular languages varied from one country to another. In France, its national language had become a popular intellectual language in the seventeenth century. In Germany, however, the prestige and popularity of Latin remained over that of German until quite later. Leibniz, for example, is well-known to have preferred French and Latin over German in his scholarly writings. This paper will briefly surveys the translations of dissertations across countries and languages (from Latin to the author's vernacular language, or even to a foreign language: Carl Linnaeus's dissertations were translated to English in the eighteenth century), and examines closely the translation of knowledge in the context of audiences, multiple languages, changing cultural and intellectual preferences, and publication practice in early eighteenth-century Germany.

Giny Cheong (George Mason University)
The Hubble Space Telescope: the Official Story and Public Perception through the Media
The Hubble Space Telescope encountered significant delays and obstacles before launch. Scientists and engineers first overcame the organizational struggles for programmatic control between Goddard Space Flight Center and Marshall Space Flight Center. The contractors next overcame manufacturing delays and assembled the space telescope by December 1985, but the loss of Challenger grounded the shuttle fleet for two years. After several schedule slips, the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-31) finally carried the long awaited telescope into space on April 24, 1990 and deployed Hubble into orbit on April 25, 1990. Unfortunately, NASA announced the problem of a spherical aberration in the primary mirror on June 25, 1990 after numerous failed attempts to focus the Hubble Space Telescope. Although the Servicing Mission (STS-61) successfully repaired the Hubble hardware, NASA’s internal problems reverberated within the agency and the media watched carefully for organizational cracks. NASA began with an investigation of the organizational and project processes, but press releases announced little new information. Members of the Hubble project team (from oral interviews) felt blindsided by the initial ominous media reports and worked hard to restore their credibility. This paper will address the internal debates surrounding how Hubble launched with an unforeseen spherical aberration and the pressures from the external debates within the media reports.

Gene Cittadino (New York University)
Contested Knowledge and Resource Policy in the Red River Boundary Dispute
When oil was discovered in the valley of the Red River and in the river bed itself in 1918, a wave of speculators descended upon the area, some obtaining oil leases from the two bordering states, Oklahoma and Texas, some purchasing riparian rights from land owners, and some making placer mining claims based on existing mineral laws. The confusion rested on the uncertainty as to the location of the boundary between the states and the matter of the ownership of the river bed itself, a confusion compounded by a tangle of historical circumstances, beginning with a treaty between the U.S. and Spain in 1819. The case was settled in the U.S. Supreme Court after several years, extensive hearings, and thousands of pages of testimony. To determine the location of the south bank of the river in 1819, the boundary specified in the original treaty, the competing parties brought in geologists, geographers, ecologists, and hydrological engineers as expert witnesses. This paper focuses on the different standards of evidence and proof accepted by the scientists, attorneys, and ordinary citizens involved, and the light that this case sheds on current discussions of scientific expertise in courts of law. Since the contesting claims were tied closely to state and federal policies and practices regarding land tenure and resource use, secondary themes concern the role of scientific expertise in adjudicating those claims and the connection between this case and then developing debates over resource policy, including the ongoing Teapot Dome scandal.

Alan Clamp (University of South Carolina)
Changes in Attitudes Towards Science in Nineteenth Century Mainstream America
Scientific American, today a popular and respected magazine, was, beginning in 1845, a weekly newspaper. Though its beginnings were humble, it developed rapidly during an era when numerous similar publications came into and out of existence within the space of a few years. This newspaper had a very broad readership during the nineteenth century, ranging from academic scientists, to inventors and engineers, to those who aspired to such and those simply interested in science in general. Studying the first fifty years of the publication, along with a few other primary and secondary sources, provides insight into mainstream American attitudes towards science during the nineteenth century. There was much debate and discussion as to the extent that science should be practical, but a dichotomy between the activities of pure science and those of practical science, does not seem to be part of mainstream American thought before the early 1880s. Thomas Edison was certainly a golden child in the pages of Scientific American during this time, but these pages simultaneously indicate great increase of the prestige of pure science, whereas earlier decades saw articles harshly critical of organizations such as the AAAS for presenting papers of little practical use. While Henry Rowland’s famous speech, “A Plea for Pure Science,” is barely given a paragraph and Rowland himself is rarely mentioned, the change in attitude roughly corresponds to the time of the speech. A developing sense of national pride also seems to have contributed to the development of an ideal of pure science.

Nicholas Clulee (Frostburg State University)
John Dee as Inspiration and Provocation for Francis Bacon’s Solomon’s House
The tendency to read Francis Bacon in the “future indicative” has privileged seeing “Solomon’s House” as the inspiration for the development of cooperative institutions of science. This futurist orientation has diminished consideration of possible sources of Bacon’s ideas. Although a work of imagination, Bacon’s vision of Solomon’s House was not likely entirely sui generis. I will suggest that there was a proximate and concrete model for Solomon’s House in the activities and aspirations of John Dee. Dee’s house at Mortlake, with its library, instrument collection, and alchemical laboratories, constituted a private research institute. In 1592 Dee proposed the creation of a more extensive research institute, expanding what he had at Mortlake into a society of scholars and research assistants under his leadership. This institute joined research in a variety of fields with a concern for public welfare and the security of the state that had informed Dee’s earlier works on navigation, exploration, and the practical value of mathematics. Dee, therefore, embodies many of the features of Solomon’s House. I will argue that Bacon was familiar with Dee’s example, which served as one of his inspirations. Dee’s embodiment of ideas and activities that Bacon rejected may also have served as a provocation to Bacon’s effort to reform and purify the work of natural philosophy. This argument will reinforce the importance of continuities between the seventeenth century with earlier natural philosophy and the importance of the research institute in shaping sites of learning in addition to universities, academies, and collaborative societies.

Erik Conway (JPL/Caltech)
Planetary Science and Global Warming: Thinking About Climate in the Space Agency
In 2003, novelist Michael Crichton gave a talk at Caltech on how Carl Sagan created global warming. Crichton, who believes global warming is a hoax, sought to taint the science with Sagan, who was widely disliked in scientific circles for his popularizing bent and in right-wing political circles for his liberalism and atheism. Crichton is clearly wrong about global warming. We have studies from the National Academy of Science going back to 1977 disproving his bizarre “environmentalist hoax” thesis. But Crichton had one thing right: Planetary scientists, not just Sagan but a large portion of what was a small community in the 1960s, were very interested in the subject of planetary climates—including Earth’s. In his recent history of global warming, Spencer Weart has focused on the contributions of Earth scientists to the discovery of this phenomenon. But the role of planetary scientists hasn’t yet been explicated (at least not honestly). Drawing on oral histories and the published scientific record, this paper will trace the planetary community’s role in bringing global warming into the mainstream of science.

Daniele Cozzoli and Mauro Capocci (Pompeu Fabra University, Dep. of Humanities, Barcelona/University of Rome)
The Making of the Italian Scientific Research System: the case of Domenico Marotta (1886-1974)
This paper will focus on the key role played by Domenico Marotta in the development of Italian science in the XX century. We will show that Marotta played a pivotal role in shaping the relations between scientific research, industry and the political and military system. A graduate in chemistry, during WWI Marotta was involved in the production of toxic gases. Later in the early ‘30s, as head of the National Fascist Chemical Society, he worked in order to tighten the ties between chemical industries and scientific establishment. In 1935, he was appointed director of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. Under Marotta’s direction, the ISS rapidly became the most important Italian biomedical institution, with a surprisingly modern organization and management. The ISS attracted a number of researchers among which Enrico Fermi and his group. Marotta managed to keep his position at the ISS after WWII. In the post war period, the ISS developed a pilot plant for the production of penicillin. Physics laboratory had a key role in the spread of molecular biology and biophysics in Italy. The ISS grew further, and Nobel Prize graduates such as Ernst Chain and Daniel Bovet were hired to work in the institute. As a matter of fact, Marotta grasped the needs of modern scientific research, and acted as a clever manager. Yet, his attitude was greatly enhanced by his political ties, and his management had a typical familist approach. This eventually led to his fall, with a judiciary prosecution that aroused much debate in Italy.

Matthew Crawford (University of California, San Diego)
Making a Better Bark: Pharmaceutical Expertise and Spain’s Royal Monopoly of Cinchona Bark in the Eighteenth Century
With the discovery of its anti-fever properties in the mid seventeenth century, Cinchona bark became an object of both scientific and commercial interest to Europeans. In the eighteenth century, as European fevers fueled demand, trade increased and the bark became the most important medicament from Spain’s American colonies. Not surprisingly, in order to increase quantities and profits, merchants engaged in the corruption of Cinchona bark, in which they mixed medically-potent bark with useless bark. In 1751, the Spanish Crown intervened with its proposal for creating a royal monopoly of Cinchona bark. This paper examines the role of pharmacists, as scientific experts, in achieving royal monopoly’s main objective from 1751 to 1790: to stop corruption of Cinchona bark and create and enforce standards of quality and purity for the bark to for the Royal Pharmacy in Madrid. In contrast to previous work that has focused mainly on the successful development of a mutually-beneficial relationship between (early) modern science and European colonial states, this case suggests that in some instances this relationship broke down. Moreover, this paper will show how, despite the centralizing tendencies of the royal monopoly, the production of knowledge about Cinchona bark and the development of standards for its material production emerged out of shared knowledge and expertise of officials and bark collectors in the colonies and of royal pharmacists in Madrid. In the end, this case shows that pharmacy, understood as a colonial science, provides additional perspective on the relationship between science and colonialism in the early modern period.

Joseph Dauben (Lehman College, City University of New York)
Peirce and Sherlock Holmes: The Abductive Scientific Method and Creative Genius
One of the stories Charles Pierce liked to tell about himself involved the theft of a valuable gold watch and his subsequent conjecture about the identify of the thief, a conjecture that turned out to be something more than a lucky guess. Peirce, playing detective, later saw the incident as a paradigmatic illustration of an important principle of his pragmatic philosophy, as well as one of his fundamental logical principles, that of abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning, in turn, is closely related not only to the subject of Peirce and the history of science in general, but to his mathematics in particular. How these relate to Sherlock Holmes’ adage: “When all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” is the subject of this proposed talk. Through history of science, Pierce expected to reach the ultimate source of all human knowledge. Peirce did not conceive of science as artificial, schematic understanding, but something living, a process, action rather than passive observation. Pasteur and Kepler were in different ways exemplars for Peirce. Both were “prepared minds” ready to intuit the laws of nature. Each sought to reason abductively. For Peirce, as for Sherlock Holmes, reasoning was a process, and abduction a method for guessing right, which more often that not succeeded because both nature and the mind of man, formed by the same laws, reflected the same laws.

Frederick Davis (Florida State University)
A Place for Toxicology: Origins of the University of Chicago Toxicity Laboratory
The Toxicity Laboratory at the University of Chicago originated during World War II as one of the major centers for toxicological research in the United States. Under the auspices of the Chemical Warfare Service, E.M.K. Geiling, the chair of the Department of Pharmacology, trained and employed more than sixty scientists. The main charge of the “Tox Lab” was to evaluate the toxicity of new chemicals for the U.S. military, but there were also several additional projects that proved to be important in the development of toxicology and environmental health. Scientists at the lab evaluated antimalarial drugs and their synergistic effects, used radioisotopes to study minute dosages, and determined the toxicity of nitrogen mustards (as well as their potential therapeutic use in treating leukemia). One of the most significant projects at the Tox Lab was conducted by Kenneth DuBois, who studied a new kind of insecticide called organic phosphates (now, organophosphates or OPs). The ambitions of Geiling and DuBois reached beyond the science of toxicology to the development of an independent discipline, a professional society, and a journal. In these efforts, they were assisted by numerous former students. With the coalescence of environmental movement during the 1960s, toxicology emerged as one of the central fields to the analysis of environmental health in America.

Angelo De Bruycker (Catholic University Leuven (Belgium))
Some Notes on Jesuit Mathematics in the Spanish Netherlands
Recent historiography of early modern science is marked by a reassessment of the Jesuit contribution to the so called Scientific Revolution. Jesuits are no longer held as the conservative persecutors of scientists proclaiming new ideas or using new methods. More generally, religion is no longer seen as being incompatible with science (as was believed by the adherents of J.W. Draper’s well-known “conflict-thesis”). As a matter of fact, the Jesuits made early and important contributions to the mathematization of physics, and they were instrumental in elevating mathematics such that its intellectual status reigned above philosophy. There are two reasons that the Jesuits of the Flemish Province take up an important place in 17th-century history of science. Firstly, the province produced a number of remarkable mathematicians, such as Gregorius a Sancto Vincentio and André Tacquet. Secondly, mathematics education in the province had begun at quite an early stage. In 1617 the Flemish Jesuits inaugurated a special mathematics course, intended for the mathematical training of future professors. But also noblemen seem to have followed this special course. The participation of noblemen in mathematics instruction is among other things reflected in the strong emphasis on the art of fortification. We refer to the course as a “special” one to differentiate it from regular mathematics instruction, as stipulated by the Ratio Studiorum. We will pay ample attention to a book entitled Disciplinae Mathematicae, published in Louvain in 1640 by the Jesuit mathematics professor Joannes Ciermans (1602-1648). This book is rather difficult to interpret, but it is nevertheless very instructive, given that it can be considered – albeit with some reservations – to be the mathematics course as taught by Ciermans.

Jean De Groot (The Catholic University of America)
Dunamis and Mechanical Advantage in Aristotle
In discussions of animal motion (Movement of Animals 7, Generation of AnimalsII.1 and 5), Aristotle likens living things to automata – puppets moved by cords or figures in an automatic theater. These references have been explained by scholars in terms of a succession of movers, each acting in turn so that a movement goes on. This is the notion of mechanism prevalent in modernity. By understanding ancient formulations of the lever, one can see that for Aristotle, automata were a means of referring to power held in reserve due to an arrangement of connected weights. The mathematical account of the lever familiar to Plato and Aristotle was that points on a revolving radius move longer and shorter distances in the same time. The principle was regularly invoked by the ancients, however, in terms of a contrast of cone and cylinder. Accounts of the rolling cone in the Aristotelian Problemata and in Hero of Alexandria’s Automatopoietika allow us to recognize references to the same in Aristotle’s comparisons of living things to automata. Aristotle uses the principle to explicate a notion of potentiality specific to different physical situations. He draws upon the correlation of smaller and larger simultaneous movements—the action of a lever—to make plausible a similar relation in movement of the limbs, somatic responses like shivering, and embryological development. This shows that Aristotle assimilated mechanical principles of a mathematical formulation into his natural philosophy. It also shows that his concept of potentiality is more physicalistic in import than has been generally understood.

Sarah de Rijcke (University of Groningen)
The Ways of the Neuron: Tracing the Circulation of Cajal's Neuron Doctrine (1888-1935)
In 1906, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Camillo Golgi for their pioneering research on the microscopic architecture of the nervous system. Golgi received the award for the development of an innovative neurohistological staining method in 1873, impregnating a limited number of cells at random. Cajal was put in the limelight for his numerous detailed neuroanatomical contributions. In this paper I explore how the concept of the neuron gained reality in the years after Cajal became acquainted with Golgi’s silver impregnation method. I will assess the alterations to an existing network (of embodied knowledge, skills, instruments, slides, staining techniques, images, people) that were needed to make room for the neuron. Two ways in which Cajal’s results traveled will occupy centre stage. First, Cajal’s artistic talent allowed him to make beautiful illustrations of the nerve cells he observed through his microscope. I will follow the tracks of some of his most crucial images. Second, Cajal took some important journeys himself. One of the key moments in the transfer of his neuron doctrine was the conference he attended in 1889 of the esteemed Anatomische Gesellschaft. After having spent years working laboriously on his histological research in his Spanish laboratory, Cajal decided it was time to immerse himself into a larger neuroanatomical network. In the paper I will focus on how he put his visual evidence to work at the conference in Berlin, and on the subsequent circulation of his neuron doctrine.

Paula De Vos (San Diego State University)
From Herbs to Alchemy: Chemical Medicine in the Colonial Mexican Pharmacy
The purpose of this paper is to trace the introduction of chemical medicine in the Spanish Empire by focusing specifically on pharmaceutical practices in Mexico in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In doing so, it relies on archival documents to demonstrate a shift at this time in the kinds of medicines used in the Mexican pharmacy, the implementation of new techniques (calcination and distillation) to prepare them, and the use of new kinds of (al)chemical apparatus as well. Alan Debus has argued that this shift occurred in Spain a bit later than it did in England, France, or Germany, atrributing it to the lack of a Paraclsian movement in Spain, which reflected Spain’s “late start” in participating in the Scientific Revolution. Archival evidence, however, reveals that the introduction of chemical medicine in the Spanish Empire requires further consideration. As Antonio Barrera has recently demonstrated, first of all, Spain was actually at the forefront of the empirical and experimental practices that came to symbolize that revolution. In addition, I would argue that the adoption of chemical medicine did not necessarily require a Paracelsian movement to take place, but one that may have stemmed from a long tradition of medical alchemy that had been in Spain since the Middle Ages. Rather, the adoption of chemical medicines in the pharmacy did not require the thorough-going rejection of the traditional medical system that Paracelsus advocated. Instead, Mexican pharmacy texts and pharmaceutical practices indicate something similar to what Debus identifies for seventeenth-century England: a kind of compromise between the “old” and the “new” – a combination of Galenic and chemical medicine that brought medical alchemy substances and techniques to the pharmaceutical “laboratory” but within a medical theory that was still thoroughly Galenic.

Peter Dear (Cornell University)
Making Two Cultures, or, Severing the Hand from the Head
In D'Alembert's discussions of trades in the Encyclopedie, he is careful to distinguish between the practical, unarticulated know-how of the craftsman from the verbalized, intellectual knowledge of the philosopher. Indeed, he goes so far as to characterize the craftsman's know-how not merely as unarticulated, but in part literally ineffable. An important part of the Encyclopedie's job, on this view, was to render the tacit knowledge of the craftsman into verbalized, theoretical knowledge. Such a process of purification would both raise the status of the knowledge so produced, and render it available to a quite separate class of users. This process of industrialization, while clearly attempting to co-opt craft skills from artisans, also co-produced new bodies of theoretical knowledge that could be portrayed as never having belonged to artisans in the first place: the production of pure science.

Ute Deichmann (Leo Baeck Institute London, University of Cologne)
German, Jewish or American? Emigré biochemists in the US and their research practices, 1890-1930
The paper will focus on three immigrants to the US from Germany and Austria, Karl Landsteiner, Jacques Loeb, and Leonor Michaelis, and their research in the interface of medicine, biology, and chemistry. These scientists belonged to a group of highly successful, mainly Jewish, medical scientists in Germany who by a unique combination of quantitative and exact empirical research and theorising, a strong focus on chemistry and mathematics, and by bridging various scientific fields, became leading figures in novel research in immunology, protein chemistry, enzymology, and intermediate metabolism. Their research practices differed markedly from that of the majority of (Jewish and non-Jewish) German biochemists, whose work was less scientific, lacking in rigorous experimentation and emphasising strongly medical application and concepts of colloidal chemistry. By influencing the work of individual American scientists, such as Hermann Muller and Linus Pauling, and that of an institution, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Landsteiner, Loeb, and Michaelis had a large impact on American science (in the case of Loeb reflected even by a novel by Sinclair Lewis) already before the large number of Jewish refugee biochemists from Nazi Germany arrived. An attempt will be made to analyze Jewish, German, and American influences on their particular ways of working.

J. Rammeloo for Denis Diagre (National Botanic Garden of Belgium)
Rooted in the Century: Strategies to Survive and Thrive of the Brussels Botanic Garden (1826-1914)
The Brussels Botanic Garden began in 1826 as the project of a joint stock company. As a commercial enterprise, its early focuses were both on mimicking research and on display to attract wealthy visitors for the stockholders' profit. Belgian botany found a home in the Universities and academies rather than at such a Garden. In 1870 though the Belgian government bought the Garden at the urging of botanist and Catholic politician B. Dumortier who sought to build a large herbarium to further narrowly taxonomic studies which were already seen as old fashioned as compared to University science. Further, even this modest scientific effort was threatened by Belgian politics during the long Catholic supremacy of 1884-1914. However, the Belgium's colony of the Congo pushed the Garden to the center of Colonial botany on a world scale and provided another niche for botanists outside academic science. The history of the Brussels Botanic Garden reflects the role of social and political pressures in shaping its contribution both to science and civic life.

Michael Dietrich (Dartmouth College)
Beyond Transplantation: Viktor Hamburger, Walter Landauer, and the Rise of Developmental Genetics in the United States
In the 1930s, Walter Landauer and Viktor Hamburger both brought their German training in embryology to bear on the creeper mutant in chickens. Working independently, Landauer and Hamburger synthesized embryology and genetics in different ways as they researched the expression of the same mutant. This paper explores the differences in the developmental genetics created by each of these émigré biologists. Given that Hamburger was forced to leave his position in Germany as a person of Jewish descent, while Landauer left in the 1920s fearing persecution for his outspoken socialism, this paper will also consider the role that these different experiences of immigration, of Germany, and of the United States may have played in their ideas of the developmental potential and the integration of development and genetics.

Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis (University of Twente)
Generations of Curves Through the Dutch Republic
Ellipses, hyperbolas, parabolas acquired all kinds of meaning in early modern mathematics. Traditionally, scholars would understand them as geometrical objects defined by the sections of planes and cones. Craftsmen, such as gardeners and architects, would conceive of them as lines drawn in planes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exchanges between various domains gave rise to new mathematical understanding of such curves. In this paper I will focus on the way conceptions of the so-called conic sections, circulated between such domains in the Dutch Republic. Frans van Schooten, professor of Dutch mathematics at the University of Leiden, is a pivotal figure. He transferred and transformed meanings of ellipses, hyperbolas parabolas in an interchange between such divergent domains as horticultural practices and Descartes' Geometrie, creating a mechanics of conic sections.

John DiMoia (Princeton University)
Teaching the Atom (II): Raymond L. Murray and the Internationalization of Nuclear Engineering at NCSU (1950-1963)
Raymond L. Murray, recruited from Oak Ridge to join the faculty of North Carolina State University in 1950 by Dr. Clifford Beck of the Department of Physics, helped to start one of the nation’s first programs in Nuclear Engineering, subsequently authoring what would become the standard text, Introduction to Nuclear Engineering (1954). Murray’s activity as a major figure at NCSU makes him important not only in terms of the expansion of the American nuclear industry, with NCSU sponsoring and directing the set-up of an on-campus reactor; but more importantly, because the campus soon became the home to numerous international students, speeding the distribution of the “peaceful atom” around the globe. This paper focuses on Murray’s legacy in this latter case, specifically, the NCSU program for international nuclear engineers, which began in the early 1950’s. Like the comparable program at Penn State University, NCSU’s program brought in international students in the wake of the “Atoms for Peace” rubric, but many of these students, typically chemists and physicists, were not familiar with the practices of American nuclear engineering. Indeed, the new field was still very much in the process of formation, leaving us to probe the motives underlying the education and training of this first generation of international nuclear engineers, a number of whom would become leaders in their own national programs.

Kevin Donnelly (Brandeis University)
Adolphe Quetelet: Professional Science, Social Theory, and the New Intellectual Hierarchy in Western Europe
My paper proposes to examine the career of the Belgian mathematician and astronomer Adolphe Quetelet, one of the most influential thinkers in the creation of the social sciences. His primary contribution to European science and thought was the application of statistical techniques—most notably, the law of error—to social phenomena. By viewing societies through their aggregate numbers, Quetelet sought to shift the focus away from individuals towards society in a variety of human behaviors, including intelligence, health, and the propensity to commit crime. In doing so, he created a form of environmental determinism that would gain an increasing number of adherents in the late nineteenth century. Ironically, while Quetelet had meant his theory to be a social leveler in the tradition of Condorcet and William Godwin, the most popular applications were found in elitist progressive movements such as eugenics and Positivist criminology. Though Quetelet was one of the most revered names in science during the middle of the nineteenth century—his admirers included Herschel, Humboldt, Faraday, Villermé, Babbage, Malthus and Darwin—the knowledge of his work has fallen into semi-obscurity since the turn of the twentieth century. His core idea of reducing societal behavior to statistical and scientific laws lives on, however, in a variety of disciplines as diverse as economics, criminology and evolutionary psychology. Quetelet, by challenging the Enlightenment’s view of humanity as a collection of discrete rational beings, helped to create the modern vision of man as social, interdependent and, ultimately, determined.

Sven Dupré (Ghent University)
Inside the Kunstkammer: Art Cabinets, Optics and Collections in Early Seventeenth-Century Antwerp
The question of the use of ‘scientific’ objects in early modern collections is one that has seldomly been posed. I will argue, however, that the application of an user’s perspective to collections is essential to understanding the role of objects in early modern collections in the generation, consumption and circulation of mathematical knowledge. In this paper I will discuss the case of early seventeenth-century Antwerp. Firstly, I will restore the contents of these historical collections, because they have been mis-represented to the extent that ‘scientific’ objects were filtered out of the more recently edited and published inventories. This led to the wrong impression that paintings were the only objects considered worthy to be collected in Antwerp. Secondly, I will concentrate on one specific kind of collectible, that is, the Antwerp art cabinet. I will trace the connections of this object to the knowledge of glass-making in Antwerp as well as to the production of books at the Offices of Plantin. Above all, however, I will argue that this object offers us a unique view on the use of optical knowledge inside early modern collections. Thirdly, I will discuss the connections between these collections and the Kunstkammer paintings invented in Antwerp in this same period. I will show that these paintings (and the collections to which they refer) allow us insights in the role of optical objects in early seventeenth-century collections in the circulation of knowledge.

Sarah Easterby-Smith (University of Warwick)
Two of a Kind? Botanical Exchange and the Commercial Plant Trade in Paris, c. 1770-1800
The term ‘commerce’ carried deeply ambiguous connotations in France throughout the eighteenth century. These connotations included a fear of social degeneration caused by luxury and a stigmatisation of some aspects of the trade and consumption of objects. Within the context of science, the practitioners who propounded their scientific learning within the commercial sphere risked being labelled as charlatans, in which case the facts and objects that they used could loose all scientific value. Focussing on the Parisian plant nursery company Vilmorin-Andrieux, this paper situates the plant trade in relation to this tension between science and commerce. The company’s history suggests that the two ‘worlds’ were not always in conflict, although plants were particularly ambiguous objects of exchange. They could be seen as superfluous luxuries, signifying weakness and effeminacy, or as building-blocks of rational scientific knowledge and improvement. Vilmorin-Andrieux grew and sold flowers for ‘unscientific’ ornamental uses in parterres and shrubberies, yet they also constructed a positive reputation as trustworthy scientists. By the 1780s, they were esteemed by botanists and statesmen at the highest levels of their respective professions, in France, Britain and America. By exploring how Vilmorin-Andrieux negotiated this ambiguity, I deconstruct the notion that there was a boundary between science and commerce in the later eighteenth century and propose a reassessment of how these two domains interacted.

Hendrik Edeler (ACTA, Academic Centre Dentistry Amsterdam)
Historical View on the Dutch Debate about Water Fluoridation (1943-1988)
Objectives: The Netherlands started in 1953 a long term clinical trial on caries reduction through water fluoridation. They were inspired by the fluoride experiments in The United States. It was concluded by the Dutch Health Council in 1960 that fluoridation of drinking water (DWF) by 1 till 1.2 ppm would help reducing dental caries by 6o percent. Therefore it was largely stimulated on a national scale but implemented on a municipal scale. As a result four million people out of thirteen million in 1973 consumed fluoridated water, but since 1976 DWF was legally and politically not possible any more. What happened?
Material and Methods: The different publications of historical actors, i.e. the opponents and the advocates of DWF, in the process of the failed introduction of DWF in the Netherlands were analyzed. There are reports of The Dutch Health Council (1960, 1970, 1973), there is an extensive collection of (news) articles, there are several (personal) archives and there are twelve substantial oral history interviews available.
Results: The debate over the water fluoridation took place in several important decades of the twentieth century, especially in the roaring sixties and anti-authoritarian seventies. The DWF was discussed from 1945 till 1990 in politics, in the public sphere, at faculties of dentistry, by civil servants, in the government and in court. The Netherlands was modernizing during this period and its citizens became more individualized. The outcome of the debate will be explained in relation to the developments in society and changing perceptions of 'good' public health. Besides of that the research shows that there were at least five different domains interfering with the discussion over the DWF; the government, the dental world, public sphere, justice and political authorities. The debate was not only between those five domains but also within them.

Carrie Eisert (Princeton University)
The Psychiatry of Birth Control Pill Acceptance, 1967-1973
This paper explores the work of Ruth W. Lidz and other psychiatrists who aimed to understand the emotional effects of birth control pills and other forms of contraception in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Lidz believed that the birth control pill and IUD represented radical breaks in the history of contraception because the psychological experience of using a virtually foolproof method was historically unprecedented. In an atmosphere of changing gender roles, psychiatrists and gynecologists wrote about a host of emotional reactions, from tales of emasculated husbands and aggressive wives, to women who “forgot” to take their pills, too guilty to live without their subconscious ambivalence towards pregnancy. Other women simply refused to use birth control pills because they seemed unnatural, and in some cases pharmaceutical companies aimed to address or capitalize on these concerns. Lidz found that psychological needs for control (or lack of control) meant that some women were psychologically able to accept some contraceptive products but not others, and in an era of advances in the fields of public relations and marketing, Lidz foresaw the possibility of developing a test to isolate different types of users. By focusing on the emotional reactions of contraceptive users and non-users, this research shows how patients were influential in a range of arenas, from pill marketing and packaging, to framing rejection and ambivalence about the pill, to pulling husbands into the equation as important actors as well.

Karin Ekholm (Indiana University)
Challenges to Galenic Anatomy in Highmore’s and Bartholin’s Textbooks of 1651
During the mid-seventeenth century English and northern European anatomists and physicians fiercely debated Harvey’s proposed circulation of the blood as well as questions pertaining to Aselli’s discovery of lacteal vessels. In 1651 Nathaniel Highmore published <i>Corporis humani disquisitio anatomica</i> and Thomas Bartholin produced the third edition of a general anatomy textbook that was originally written by his father, Caspar Bartholin. These two textbooks of 1651 are the first to advocate Harvey’s theory and also treat lacteal vessels. I will look at the circulation, reception, and readership of these textbooks and, in particular, at the roles these textbooks played, both in and outside academic institutions north of the Alps, in the debates over and ultimate acceptance of these new anatomical discoveries.

Jim Endersby (University of Sussex)
What Does a Species Look Like?
This paper will look at Victorian botanical illustrations, at the ways in which they were produced and consumed and, in particular, at how naturalists learned to draw. In learning the conventions of depiction that identified their pictures as properly scientific illustrations, naturalists were internalising a set of rules that helped establish what they could – and could not – see. Learning to draw was a key practice that trained budding naturalists to see the world in a new way; in particular, it trained colonial and local naturalists to see the world through imperial eyes, according to standards that were developed in the metropolitan centre and which served metropolitan purposes.

Paul Erickson (University of Michigan)
A Calculus for a Science of Peace? Peace Research, Conflict Resolution, and the History of Game Theory
Prior to its recent renaissance in economics, game theory was viewed principally as a creature of the military. Correspondingly, in popular works such as William Poundstone’s <i>Prisoner’s Dilemma</i>, game theory comes across as a cynical logic utilized by military analysts to plot the nuclear arms race of the early Cold War. Recent scholarship has suggested that this impression of game theory’s relationship with organizations such as the Air Force’s RAND Corporation and the Office of Naval Research in the 1940s and 1950s is substantially inaccurate. Yet game theory clearly did become intertwined with discussions of nuclear war and peace in the early 1960s, and the question of how and why this happened remains largely unanswered. This paper focuses on an effort by peace advocates in the United States and Europe to create a “science of peace” to counter the pervasive influence of military patronage in science. These left-leaning academics looked to game theory for lessons on resolving international conflicts such as arms races and military escalation. In the process, they arrived at a particular understanding and interpretation of game theory that was strikingly different from that of the military mathematicians. By examining the epistemological debates that informed this movement and the interpretation of game theory presented in the work of Theodore Lentz, Kenneth Boulding and Anatol Rapoport, this paper will complement historical accounts that stress game theory’s military origins and inspirations.

Kasper Eskildsen (Roskilde University)
Entering the World Stage: Philosophy, Art, and Critique of Higher Learning during the Early Enlightenment
This paper investigates the metaphor of the world stage, as a critique of higher learning during the Early Enlightenment. It describes how critical philosophers repeatedly reinterpreted the metaphor and rendered it with new meanings. These reinterpretations reflected not only differences in languages, institutional contexts, and local customs, but also the possibilities and limitations of the media in which the metaphor appeared. During the early Enlightenment, academics entered the world stage in oil paintings, engravings, student travelogues, university textbooks, Latin orations and vernacular poems, upon theater stages and at masquerades. The metaphor served as a tool of demarcation and ridicule, but also inspired philosophical reflection and academic introspection. The paper especially focuses upon the Saxon philosopher Christian Thomasius and his followers across Northern Europe. These mostly German and Scandinavian university professors used the metaphor not only to expose quacks, impostors, and scholastics, but also to mock representatives of new philosophy and even to ridicule themselves and their colleagues. They exposed the world stage as a place of deception and fraud, but simultaneously questioned if the world stage was escapable. In conclusion, the paper investigates the institutional consequences of these debates through the example of the University of Copenhagen.

Fa-ti Fan (Binghamton University)
Earthquake Prediction and Mass Politics in Communist China
Because of the devastation caused by several powerful earthquakes in the 1960s-70s, earthquake prediction became one of the most important and urgent scientific programs in Communist China. Through science dissemination and political mobilization, the Communist government recruited the masses for earthquake prediction. The Chinese developed theories and practices of earthquake prediction based on everyday observation. The people were urged to pay close attention to abnormal natural phenomena which might indicate the coming of an earthquake: strange animal behaviors, odd weather changes, unusual movements of the river or well water, etc. Information about how to conduct such observations and reports on successes filled newspapers and magazines. Pamphlets and instruction sheets on the subject were distributed to local governments and organizations. The shortage of advanced scientific instruments was only one of the reasons that the Communist government actively promoted earthquake prediction among the general populace. There were also political and ideological reasons. Their approach followed the mass politics particularly widespread during the Cultural Revolution. On the one hand, it encouraged the people to question the authority of elite scientists. On the other, it championed mass participation in science. This paper examines mass participation in earthquake prediction in Communist China with an emphasis on the epistemology underlining the techniques of observation and prediction. What counted as observable phenomena or observed evidence? What observations were considered credible? What were the epistemological assumptions and processes of everyday observation? What were the political/ideological contents of such epistemology?

Nahyan Fancy (DePauw University)
Soul, Spirit, Resurrection and the Discovery of the Pulmonary Transit of Blood
Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288) has been widely recognized as the discoverer of the pulmonary transit of blood. However, there has hardly been a study that seeks to place his discovery within the larger context of his time. This paper seeks to fill that lacuna. In particular, it concentrates on the philosophical and theological context of his time period, especially with regards to the debates surrounding the immortality of the soul and resurrection. Ibn al-Nafis proceeds to articulate a new relationship between the soul and body, which ultimately leads him to replace Galenic and Avicennian physiology with his own new understanding of the relationship between the faculties, spirit and the soul. This new physiology then provides the basis for his understanding of the pulmonary transit of blood as well as bodily resurrection.

Maria Farland (Fordham University)
Decomposing City: Walt Whitman, Sanitary Science, and "Leaves of Grass"
This paper locates situates Walt Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass" in the context of New York’s environmental health crisis in the 1850s and 60s. Against the dominant conception of Whitman as a poet who celebrates urban life, I argue that “This Compost”-—and related lyrics in "Leaves of Grass"-—express profound discomfort with the City’s escalating waste, decay, and decomposing matter, and their effects on environmental and individual health. The poet’s early prose writings endorse sanitary science as the basis for improved environmental and individual health, whereas his later poetry looks to botanical specimens such as leaves and grass as the preferred healing agents, viewing nature as the “Best Physician.” Whitman's famous poems reflect the poet's detailed and specific knowledge of developments in sanitary science in an urban context. This paper juxtaposes careful analysis of New York-based scientists in the areas of public health and sanitary science and careful readings of Whitman's famous lyrics, to show the ways in which the poet's writings were informed by local scientific intellectual currents.

Gabriel Finkelstein (University of Colorado-Denver)
Emil du Bois-Reymond and the End of Science
During the initial decade of the German Empire the physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond twice argued that certain questions lay beyond the limits of scientific understanding. His contention was not original—Tyndall raised the issue previously in Britain, and before him, mentions appeared in the works of Locke and Leibniz. But du Bois-Reymond was the first to address the matter systematically, and in so doing, he sparked a controversy that continues even today. My talk will trace the origin, impact, and fallout of du Bois-Reymond remarks in Berlin and beyond.

Kevin Francis (Evergreen State College)
Henry Fairfield Osborn and the Evolutionary Case for Species Preservation
Darwinian evolution posed a dilemma for scientists concerned about species extinction. Fossil evidence offered abundant evidence that extinction was an unremarkable event in earth history. Certain evolutionary patterns, like adaptive radiation, even suggested that the disappearance of some species created opportunities for new species to emerge. Moreover, the mechanism of natural selection, governing the world through pervasive competition, made human eradication of other species part of the natural order.
This paper examines the work of early twentieth-century scientists, especially the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, who disputed these implications of evolutionary theory. Osborn argued that species, like ancient monuments, should be preserved out of "veneration of age." Against those who suggested that extinction was part of the natural order, Osborn argued that the rate of human-caused extinctions was unprecedented in earth history. He promoted this position through speeches and publications, exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, and conservation work with the New York Zoological Society.
Recent scholarship has emphasized the role that humanitarians and ecologists played in recognizing the intrinsic value of species. This paper argues that evolutionary biologists like Osborn played an important, but largely ignored, role in the development of this environmental ethic. Osborn's position that species deserve moral "standing" and protection based on their longevity through evolutionary time was eventually promoted by scientists like David Ehrenfeld and E. O. Wilson.

Olival Freire (Universidade Federal da Bahia – Brazil)
The Birth of the Everettian Heresy
Hugh Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics, firstly appeared as his Princeton PhD dissertation under John Wheeler, has been an influential one among physicists and philosophers in the last two decades. Yet, the number of historical studies dealing with this approach, the context of its birth, and its reception is scant. Some recently unearthed documentary materials show that the dissertation manuscript was brought by Wheeler to Copenhagen in 1956 to be discussed with Bohr and possibly published by the Danish Academy of Sciences. Contrary to Wheeler's hopes, however, Bohr, Rosenfeld, and Petersen gave a negative appraisal, since they regarded Everett’s proposal as sharply at odds with the philosophical framework of the Copenhagen interpretation. The original 137 pages were rewritten by Everett and Wheeler in a condensed version of 36 pages. Everett, who had accepted a job at the Pentagon in the meantime, never returned to fundamental physics. After reviewing the documentary evidence on those events, we focus on issues such as: why did Wheeler attempt to get Bohr’s approval? On what grounds did he believe that Bohr might indeed give his support to Everett's work? Why were these expectations disappointed? The answers to these questions will reveal to what extent Bohr's ideas, though influential, were misunderstood by his contemporaries - even by someone like Wheeler, who considered himself a Bohrian. Also, they will emphasize how deep an intellectual gap might exist between physicists concerned with the interpretational problems of quantum mechanics at the time. [Co-authors: S. Osnaghi and F. Freitas].

 

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