History of Science Society

2007 Annual Meeting

Abstracts M-R

Craig Martin (Oakland University)

Vernacular Meteorology for Courtiers and Ladies

Commentaries and digests on Aristotelian works had been translated into vernacular languages at least since the time of Nicole Oresme and continued into the seventeenth century. This paper looks at one particular movement that has previously been unnoticed by scholars. In sixteenth-century Italy we find a large number of vernacular treatments of Aristotle's Meteorology and other meteorological writings. Diverse writers, ranging from professors to courtiers, wrote these works in a variety of genres, such as dialogues and disputations, for a number of audiences, including noble women and artisanal men. This paper explores why meteorology, a subject often considered elementary, removed from many theological disputes, and applicable to many practical skills, was deemed suitable and useful reading for these audiences.

Rachel Mason Dentinger (University of Minnesota)

Plant Passivity or Animal Activity?: Contesting the Chemical Geography of Plant-Herbivore Communities in 1960s Ecology

When the same research question, pursued in ostensibly similar field sites, leads to different results, an opportunity arises to examine the variation that underlies not only the physical sites, but also the disciplinary orientations that contextualize researchers’ conclusions. This paper examines how two groups of ecologists developed divergent perspectives on the formation of California chaparral communities in the 1960s. Striking patterns of plant growth and distribution are common in chaparral, where a conspicuous “bare zone,” devoid of plants, often surrounds a stand of shrubs. University of California, Santa Barbara, plant ecologist Cornelius H. Muller understood this remarkable pattern as a function of the plant community’s chemical geography, arguing that volatile toxins excreted by the shrubs inhibited the growth of other plants. By contrast, a cohort of Stanford ecologists asserted that the structure of chaparral communities was the result of grazing by rodents. Though both groups worked in Southern California, they met the challenges of their respective field sites with different practical and intellectual solutions, bringing their distinct social milieus to bear upon their interpretation of results. Both groups acknowledged the agency of plants and animals in shaping communities and both groups examined plant and animal activity in their field sites; yet, the ecological and evolutionary phenomena they mapped onto the physical geography of the bare zone were profoundly different.

Aaron Mauck (Harvard University)

Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Institutional Change in American Medicine, 1935-1950

The retreat of infectious disease at the turn of the last century portended a growing place for chronic conditions in clinical medicine. By the 1920s, physicians were regularly expressing alarm over increasing rates of chronic diseases previously considered relatively uncommon. These anxieties were solidified in the results of a five-year longitudinal study on the impact of chronic disease in the Eastern Health District of Baltimore, published in 1941. This study, a joint venture of the United States Public Health Service and the Milbank Memorial Fund, concluded that chronic disease constituted a rapidly growing proportion of the disease burden, and that available health resources were ill-equipped to address the challenges of long term care it generated. This paper examines the clinical recommendations proposed by the Baltimore Group in light of growing rates of adult diabetes and other chronic diseases. Although this disease was largely overshadowed in the popular press by childhood diabetes, the failure of insulin as an effective tool in the treatment of the adult form shifted medical attention towards strategies of dietary prevention and treatment, and gave rise to a body of research devoted to new social and clinical methods of addressing this growing public health problem. This case points to the ways in which rising awareness of chronicity reshaped the clinical and institutional structure of American Medicine during the middle of the twentieth century.

Eleanor Mayer (University of Pennsylvania)

Law and the Asylum in Pennsylvania, 1900-1990

Deinstitutionalization has been a fact of American life for nearly a half century. Beginning in the 1950s, American asylums were emptied across the country for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons were moral and ethical—concerns about the treatment of the mentally ill became more pressing as the society came to a new understanding of what constituted humane treatment of people with mental illnesses.  Deinstitutionalization was encouraged by a series of class action lawsuits that shed light on the appalling conditions of some of the mental institutions in which many asylum residents were housed. In addition to this series of lawsuits, the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963 brought the issue of deinstitutionalization squarely into the legal and regulatory arena. Given the importance of law in American society, however, it is not surprising that these interactions—largely focused on the harms inflicted by some mental hospitals—were not the first time mental institutions came within the influence of the law. My paper will explore the interactions of the law with selected hospitals across Pennsylvania throughout the 20th century, examining how legal and regulatory influence fluctuated as the status of the hospitals—and the reputation of the services they provided—altered throughout the century. 

Adrienne Mayor (Stanford University)

Fossils in Native American Lands: Whose Bones, Whose Story?

Conflicts over the possession and meaning of the fossilized skeletons of dinosaurs and extinct mammals found in Native American lands accompanied the emergence of the modern scientific discipline of paleontology. Since the nineteenth century, important paleontological specimens have been collected from lands occupied by indigenous people. These specimens have been used for study and profit by government agencies, museums, and scientists, who deny or reject local ownership, knowledge, and cultural traditions associated with the fossils. The issues in dispute include the fossils’ relationship to cultural identity, proper treatment of the remains, and who has the right to own and interpret fossils. The practice of appropriating valuable fossils from weaker or conquered people is not new, nor are the tensions created by such acquisitions unique. Examples from classical antiquity and early modern Europe reveal that large vertebrate fossils have long been tied to national identities and power inequalities, links that persist today in North America. Modern examples of disputed ownership, value, and meaning of fossils include the US government seizure of the famous T. rex dinosaur named Sue, the ongoing National Park Service standoff with the Lakota over large fossils in Badlands National Park, continuing requests by Navajos and other tribes for the return of significant fossils taken from reservations, and similar conflicts in Mexico. I conclude with positive of cooperation and communication between traditional cultures and established authorities to suggest ways of resolving conflicts over remains of creatures from past ages.

Craig McConnell (California State University Fullerton)

Taken by Surprise: Sputnik and the Measurement of Allopsychic Reorientation in the Space Age

During the course of the International Geophysical Year, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux planned to study the impact of the launch of the first artificial satellite on the American sense of self and place. The allopsychic reorientation that they imagined would accompany the knowledge of a man-made object in space was to be studied by in-depth interviews with thousands of Americans before and after the launch. With the surprise launch of Sputnik, this once in a lifetime research opportunity was thrown into disarray. They responded by quickly mobilizing a network of colleagues and supporters, many of them school teachers who had been engaged in the work that led to their seminal Science article “The Image of the Scientist.” In the end, the chaotic and inconsistent data collection efforts in the days after the news of the Sputnik launch generated a great deal of raw material that lacked the control and the depth that would allow them to analyze the allopsychic impact of this epochal event. Though Mead and Metraux abandoned the project, they preserved the data in their papers. In describing their efforts to gauge the American response to the newly dawning space age, I will reveal a complex and unexpected portrait of the American reaction to the launch of Sputnik.

Ted McCormick (National University of Ireland, Galway)

The Advancement of Policy: Art and Nature in William Petty’s Political Arithmetic

Sir William Petty (1623-1687) is most often remembered as a pioneer in the field of quantitative economic analysis. But he was also a physician, an associate of the Hartlib Circle, a founding Fellow of the Royal Society and a major player in the English colonization of Ireland during the later seventeenth century. His most famous economic work – “political arithmetic” – was coupled with something he called “political anatomy”, and designed, in his words, as “political medicine” for Ireland. In short, Petty’s “economics” began as a colonial political strategy that drew on his background in medicine and experimental natural philosophy. This paper examines the three-way linkage in Petty’s printed and manuscript work between experimental science, the pursuit of economic improvement, and the problems of colonial government. Specifically, I argue that Petty’s political arithmetic applied an essentially Baconian understanding of the art-nature relationship to the political sphere, first in colonial and subsequently in metropolitan and pan-imperial contexts. Moved by the peculiar problems facing the restored Stuart multiple-monarchy in the 1670s and 1680s, and employing a range of different technologies (mathematical, mechanical and alchemical) within this Baconian framework, Petty’s work invested policy with the power to alter natural “situations” precisely by harnessing natural processes – improving both land and people by “letting nature work” for both economic and political ends.

Andrew Mendelsohn (Imperial College London)

The Role of Forensics in the Rise of Modern Medical Thought

Most stories of modern medicine – and arguably of expertise generally – are stories of differentiation: discipline formation, specialization, separation of research careers from practitioner ones, separation of roles once combined in single individuals into distinct occupations or professions such as, to take the case in point, forensic medicine. This paper presents, instead, a history of expertise converging with and reshaping science. Knowing and investigating the pathological anatomy of dead bodies and explaining those deaths by discriminating among rather than concatenating causes: these two goals and activities were central to forensic or legal medical expertise at least since its inception in the 16th and 17th centuries. But they were not central to Western medicine at large until the 19th century. Drawing on archival material, I offer two main theses. First, the new science of pathology created under the leadership of Rudolf Virchow in Germany in the 1840s-60s was as much a new way of knowing – a system of dissection, observation, and representation – as it was a new (cellular) theory, and forensic aims and procedures of courts of law provided a model for its practices and its epistemology. Second, the causal explanatory aspect of forensics helped induce some who were trained in the new pathology to move toward reestablishing medicine on an etiological rather than pathological basis and provided a model for explaining disease by single causes, a hitherto rare mode of disease explanation which now became compelling.

Peter Mickulas (New Jersey Historical Commission)

Getting and Growing: Nathaniel Britton, New York, and the Politics of American Botany

In the 1890s, botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton united New York City's private Gilded Age wealth with the expertise of its professionalizing scientists in order to realize his vision of a world-class botanical research institution organized within the landscaped confines of a Bronx park. The resulting New York Botanical Garden was constructed, in part with municipal funds, as a grand outdoor urban space with the potential to exert a salutary moral influence over the city's population. Britton's foremost concern, however, was the establishment of a New York venue for botanical science.Convinced of the necessity of American scientific independence from European repositories of knowledge, Britton used the Garden to create a specifically American space for the practice of New World botany by mounting a series of expeditions that catalogued the flora of the Western Hemisphere, including, significantly, the US colony of Puerto Rico. Britton sought to situate the NYBG within the profitable context of practical science; in doing so, he privileged the needs of a scientific institution over those of a picturesque public park. His success in establishing the Garden illustrates the ways in which taxonomic botany remained a crucial scientific endeavor throughout the 20th century.

Hiromi Mizuno (University of Minnesota)

Scientific Nationalism: In the Case of Wartime Japan

When we examine science in non-Western societies (such as China and Japan as my co-panelists do), should we engage in a question of how their scientific enterprises differ from those of the West or other parts of the world? Or should we resist the Eurocentric urge to “compare” all together while making another potentially Eurocentric assumption that modern science is universally the same regardless of the differing contexts of its production? While the question may sound simplistic, it has seriously affected studies non-Western sciences, whether the focus of analysis be the epistemological, structural, or cultural dimension of science. To tackle this question at a theoretical level, this paper proposes a new concept, which I term “scientific nationalism.” I define “scientific nationalism” as a kind of nationalism that believes in the priority and ultimate power of science for the survival and development of a nation. It is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon, and is exemplified both by Nazi science, which has been perceived as pseudoscience, as well as US Cold War science, whose legitimacy has been accepted. The concept of scientific nationalism directs us away from the comparative or even teleological style of studies of non-Western science and instead engages with the question of how nationalism shapes the discourse and practice of science. While using wartime Japanese scientific nationalism as an example, the paper aims to generate a discussion that cuts across the geographical focus of the other papers on the panel, elaborating on the theoretical implication of “scientific nationalism” for a study of any nation.

Georgina Montgomery (Montana State University)

Situating Transnational Science: The History of the Amboseli Baboon Project, 1963-Present

Primatologists Jeanne and Stuart Altmann have managed the Amboseli Baboon Project since 1963, initially while affiliated with the University of Chicago and currently with Princeton University. The Amboseli Baboon Project serves as a case study for an examination of the matrix of individuals, institutions and government bodies necessary for the establishment and maintenance of a long-term primate field study. Approaching its forty-fifth year, the Amboseli Baboon Project reveals the challenges involved in collecting and managing long-term data sets and the social and political networks involved in conducting transnational science. These relationships between Kenya and the United States, and within their borders, reveal the complex role of place in the history of field sciences.

Matthew Moore (Brooklyn College of the City University of New York)

On Peirce's Proofs of Cantor's Theorem

In an article entitled "The Logic of Relatives," published in 1897, Charles Sanders Peirce announced as his own discovery a result about the sizes of infinite sets which is in effect what has come to be known as Cantor's Theorem. Though the evidence is fragmentary, it appears that Peirce did indeed discover the result independently. A review of his main proofs of the theorem will reveal a good deal about the philosophical motivations that led Peirce to his discovery, and will cast light on his philosophical applications of it.

Robert Morrison (Whitman College)

The Transmission of Islamic Astronomy to Jews

By the ninth century C. E., Islamic scientists had begun to identify the inconsistencies of Hellenistic astronomy. Later, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, two new astronomies emerged to replace the Hellenistic writings. In the Islamic East (i.e. Iran), scientists developed theories that eliminated the noted inconsistencies but retained the predictive accuracy (do the theoretical models account for the available observations?) of Hellenistic astronomy. In the Iberian peninsula, philosophers and scientists, both Jewish and Muslim, took a different tack and addressed some of Ptolemy’s departures, made in the name of predictive accuracy, from Aristotelian philosophy. My current project is an in-depth study of a Judaeo-Arabic text, <i>The Light of the World</i> that represents the second of these astronomies. Dating from approximately 1400, it is the only text on theoretical astronomy by a Jew in any type of Arabic.  In publications, I have described the text’s model for the motion of the sun and the development of that model in the subsequent Hebrew recension of <i>The Light of the World</i>. In this presentation I investigate the text’s theories about the motions of the moon and planets. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the text could be evidence for the transmission of Islamic science from the Islamic East to the Iberian Peninsula, and then into Hebrew scientific texts. Time permitting, I would also like to examine the broader intellectual milieu of this text.

Thomas Mullaney (Stanford University)

The East is Red: The Unification of Time in Communist China

From the eastern face of Heilongjiang province to the western edge of Xinjiang, the People’s Republic of China spans five internationally recognized time zones. The Chinese state, however, recognizes only one: Beijing Time, as it is known colloquially. Following the 1949 Revolution, the Communist government unified mainland Chinese time, collapsing the five temporal zones observed in the Republican period (1911-1949) into a single standard. Due to this peculiar system of enforced simultaneity, people in China experience daily life in a host of radically different ways depending upon their distance from the capital. For some, the workday is synchronized with the sun. For others, particularly those in the minority regions of western China, economic imperatives require them to rise in complete darkness. When “the east is red,” as the popular Communist tune tells us, the west is still black as night. Whereas scholars have explored the standardization of time in a Euro-American context (Bartky 2000, Galison 2003), there has yet to be a sustained investigation of modern Chinese temporality. This paper will examine the formation of Beijing Time in the early Communist period and the longer, more tortuous process of regional calibration that ensued. I will also draw upon my own background in Ethnic Studies to examine Beijing Time from the perspective of western China: an area inhabited by myriad minority groups who the Communists have attempted to integrate into a temporal scheme that inherently favors the eastern, Han-dominated parts of the country.

Annette Munt (Independent Scholar)

Dutch Cartesian Medical Reformism in German Translation During the Early Enlightenment(1680-1720)

My paper analyses the reception and impact of Dutch Cartesian medical reformers in German culture during the Early Enlightenment period. The large number of translations, editions and reissues of the works of Cornelis Bontekoe, Steven Blankaart, Heidentryk Overkamp and their Cartesian followers in various parts of Germany between the late 1680s and the early eighteenth century points to the wide diffusion of their ideas in the German vernacular. Their proposed reforms, also disseminated in articles and book reviews in German language journals, involved the rejection of traditional Galenic-Aristotelian theory and practice, placing medicine in an essentially new, mechanistic science-oriented Cartesian philosophical framework. The German debates and controversies surrounding these self-proclaimed reformers’ iatrochemical conception of how to preserve health, prevent illness and prolong life, illustrate the clash between traditional elements of popular medical culture, based on humoral pathology, and the intrusion into the public sphere of new perspectives contributing to a change in people’s perceptions of illness and attitudes to health care. Especially controversial, apart from disputes over disclosing medical knowledge to the lay public in the vernacular, was their advocating the virtual abolition of blood-letting and purging and their promoting the new life-style issues of tea and coffee drinking and tobacco-smoking. The resulting quarrels, the evidence shows, to some extent penetrated to social strata beyond those likely to read their books through the explanations of medical practitioners, declarations from the pulpit and general conversation, and not least via the new milieu of coffee houses and women’s so-called ‘Caffeé-Schmäußgen’ (coffee circles).

Tania Munz (Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceBerlin)

Lessons From the Hive: Nazi Educational Film and Karl von Frisch’s Portrayal of the Drones

‘Lazy, stupid, fat and greedy’ – these are the words bee researcher Karl von Frisch borrowed from the popular nineteenth-century German satirist Wilhelm Busch to describe the males of the bee hive. Von Frisch is perhaps best known today for having discovered the meaning of the bee dances. Through a series of elegant experiments, he determined that worker bees use their mysterious circle and waggle movements to communicate the distance and direction of food sources to their hive mates. His findings earned him a Nobel Prize in 1973. But he is also remembered for having carried out much of this work under difficult circumstances of WWII Germany – his institute and home in Munich were severely damaged by Allied bombings and he faced threats of being ousted from his university position, because of a Jewish grandmother. Less well known is that among the many scientific films he created over the span of several decades, he also produced two educational films between 1942 and 1944 on honeybees with moneys from the Reich Center for Educational Film. Not unlike the entertainment film industry, educational film was centralized under the Nazi government and considerable resources were poured into production and distribution. Film was prized as an instructional tool and young Germans saw more films than ever before in classrooms, movie theatres, and meetings of the Hitler Youth. Films about nature and animals were especially popular. In this paper, I examine von Frisch’s film “The Development of the Honeybee and of a Colony.” In particular, I offer a close reading of its final sequence, in which the harmonious chronicles of the hive give way to jarring scenes in which the drones are rounded up, expelled, and killed. Although von Frisch was certainly no friend of the Regime and the film was cleared by British post-war censors, the project is rife with imagery that bespeaks the sociopolitical rhetoric of the times.

Kathleen Murphy (California Polytechnic State University)

Science, Prosperity, and National Advantage: John Ellis and Networks of Natural History in the British Atlantic, 1755-1776

The English naturalist John Ellis described his motivation for writing An Historical Account of Coffee (1774) as “the promotion of science, national advantage, and the prosperity of the Island for which I have the honour to be Agent.” The agent for Dominica and West Florida well understood the intimate relationship between science, commerce, and imperial politics in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. As an imperial official and active member of the Royal Society, Ellis was ideally placed as an intermediary between aspiring colonial virtuosi, illustrious European naturalists, and imperial officialdom. The agent’s centrality in the networks of natural history lay in his ability to draw upon these sundry connections in the circuits of commerce, politics, and natural history on behalf of his colonial correspondents. His contacts, interests, and influence as an imperial official and merchant simultaneously shaped the colonial naturalists with whom he corresponded, the favors he performed for those individuals, and the aspects of natural history which most engaged his attention. This paper explores how British networks of knowledge complimented networks of commerce and politics in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Drawing upon Ellis’s colonial correspondence, contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, and other publications, it argues that his professional contacts laid the foundation for his natural historical exchanges.

Joseph November (University of South Carolina)

‘Planting the Seeds:’ How the NIH Cultivated Biomedical Computing

Between 1960 and 1963 the NIH’s Advisory Committee on Computers in Research (ACCR) was the primary sponsor of American biomedical computing. ACCR grants, totaling over $40 million, were disbursed towards the purchase or development of computer systems, with the aim of formally rationalizing and unifying biomedical research by computerizing it. A further goal of the ACCR was to establish “centers of biomedical computing” that would consolidate small life sciences laboratories into much larger operations, rivaling those emerging in “big physics.” These ambitious efforts met with only modest success, but due to their vast scope their legacy has been significant, both in terms of shaping research practice and informing future NIH attempts to transform science by introducing new technology to research environments. Although the ACCR’s influence on university-based research is well documented, the NIH side of the story remains opaque and it is therefore imperative that historians understand how the committee’s influential priorities took shape. Compounding this challenge, the ACCR paradoxically emerged at a time when the NIH was generally hostile to research computing endeavors. To elucidate both the intellectual agenda and the puzzling ascension of the ACCR I will examine the committee’s role in developing the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC) as well as its role in fostering the growth of the Health Sciences Computing Facility (HSCF) and the Brain Research Institute’s Data Processing Laboratory (DPL), both at UCLA.

Lynn Nyhart (University of Wisconsin—Madison)

Emigration, Migration, Annexation: The Strange History of the "Lebensraum" Concept in German Geography

The concept of Lebensraum ("living space")is notorious for its use by Adolf Hitler to justify expanding the “natural boundaries” of the German state–that is, the proper home of the true German (Aryan) race. Hitler was inspired by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who viewed migration and territorial expansion as a natural drive among all organisms–animals, plants, people– a concept that associated expansion of space with evolutionary success. Ratzel’s perspective in turn drew heavily from his teacher, the mid-nineteenth-century naturalist and geographer Moritz Wagner, who first developed his own ideas of the naturalness of migration in quite a different context– his travel writings chronicling the search by German emigrants for new places to settle. Whereas Hitler would turn his concept to the annexation of territory contiguous with Germany’s borders in the interests of racial expansion, Wagner, a committed democrat and anti-racist, had emphasized the importance of isolation and small-scale “colonization,”–a perspective that had led him to develop a non-Darwinian theory of evolution that projected his analysis of German emigrants onto animal and plant nature. This paper traces the concepts of Lebensraum and (e)migration as they moved back and forth across the human and non-human realms, and as they followed German history in moving from a vision of nature (and of Germans) characterized by small, fragile groups making their way in a difficult environment to an imperial model of annexation and interracial struggle.

Kalil Oldham (University of California, Berkeley)

Locating ‘Cause’ in "fin-de-siécle" Philosophy of Physics: Gustav Kirchhoff’s Importance for Helmholtz, Mach, and Boltzmann

In prefacing his inaugural Berlin lectures of 1875 Gustav Kirchhoff argued for a severe limitation of the scope of “pure mechanics.” He asserted that physicists ought not to concern themselves with investigating causes, which only leads to confusion. They should, on the other hand, focus only on developing a complete and simple description of natural phenomena. In this paper I examine three different responses to Kirchhoff’s new program for physics – by Ludwig Boltzmann, Ernst Mach, and Hermann von Helmholtz. Their interpretations appeared in books, essays, and lectures in the thirty or so years after Kirchhoff published his comments. Kirchhoff was more than an important touchstone for these leading philosopher-physicists; in forming their philosophical systems, each appropriated Kirchhoff’s legacy for his own purposes. Helmholtz regularly defended his use of the notion of cause against positions like Kirchhoff’s. Mach, on the other hand, embraced Kirchhoff’s remarks and he hoped Kirchhoff’s fame and notoriety would cast a favorable light on his own position on the ‘economical’ nature of scientific explanation. Boltzmann, puzzlingly, lamented the move away from physical pictures of nature but he simultaneously admired Kirchhoff’s philosophical stance. Taken alone, Kirchhoff’s comments amounted to the outlines of an epistemological position. Because it signaled a fundamental transformation in physicists’ thinking about their own work, his stance was a portent. Historically Kirchhoff represents the rising tide of widespread ambivalence towards complete, causal, or ‘true’ explanations in science. Precisely how he fits into this story has yet to be completely understood.

Todd Olszewski (Yale University)

Rudolf Schoenheimer, Atherogenesis, and Sterol Metabolism in the 1920's.

On February 27, 1931, Rudolf Schoenheimer, professor of chemistry at the University of Freiburg, presented the Alpha Omega Alpha lecture in Cleveland, Ohio. Remarking how experimental efforts had seemingly implicated cholesterol as a culprit in atherogenesis for almost twenty years, Schoenheimer lamented how such conclusions had yet to translate over to clinical medicine. In spite of the extensive induction of experimental atherosclerosis in laboratory animal models, Schoenheimer illustrated how pathologists and physiologists could identify neither the mechanism that triggered atherogenesis nor the process of arterial plaque formation. Nor could they distinguish between endogenous and exogenous sources of cholesterol, a distinction critical to unraveling the mysteries surrounding atherogenesis and one that would guide Schoenheimer’s entrée into sterol metabolism research. This paper retraces Schoenheimer’s early scientific career and builds upon historian Robert Kohler’s masterful recapitulation of the professional motivations that guided Schoenheimer’s introduction of isotopic tracers to biological research. Following the receipt of his medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1922, Schoenheimer served as resident pathologist at Berlin’s Moabit Hospital. It was here where he first observed atherosclerotic plaques and began research on atherogenesis that would continue when he joined the University of Freiburg’s Pathological Institute as a chemist in 1926. Schoenheimer’s efforts to clarify the relationship between atherogenesis and cholesterol biosynthesis effectively predated the growth of clinical interest in cholesterol that would emerge with the advent of cardiovascular epidemiology in 1947. Schoenheimer’s investigations would form the scientific and technological base upon which cardiovascular epidemiologists would build their body of research on cholesterol metabolism.

Chris Otter (Ohio State University)

Electrifying Perception: Colour, Distance and Detail 1875-1900

The emergence of viable electric light systems in the later nineteenth century has often been seen as marking a radical break with earlier forms of illumination. This break has been conceived in terms of a passage from murk to brilliance, yellowness to whiteness, or indistinctness to clarity. This paper analyses and critiques this assumption by examining three very distinct visual capacities which were invariably discussed and measured when lightsources were compared: the perception of colour, perception over long distance, and the perception of detail. In all these areas, electric light was advanced as intrinsically superior to gas, oil and candles. The heat of incandescent and arc light produced light which chromatically simulated solar illumination, while the arc’s brute power illuminated at greater distance than earlier lights. The delicate power of incandescent light was presented as producing conditions under which judicious ocular discernment could be made. Experimental installations of electric light often took place in locations where one or several of these visual capacities were required: drapers’ shops, lighthouses, operating theatres. However, electric light’s ability to achieve these viewing conditions was contested. Gas engineers argued that colours were too sharp and astringent under electric light, and they produced spectroscopic evidence as proof. Lighthouses fitted with arcs, meanwhile, might dazzle or disorient. Candles were often preferred for reading, even by those able to afford alternatives. I offer two general conclusions. First, the pattern of illumination technologies is extremely complex and idiosyncratic: there was simply no closure around stable systems by 1900. Second, historians must always approach illumination technologies through the embodied visual practices they facilitated or inhibited and the spaces where such perception took place. These practices were typically ones of productive attention, work, reading, transportation: in other words, those of a dynamic, industrialised, liberal society. To the extent that it cemented and secured such practices, electric light, like gas before it, might be regarded as a conservative force as much as a revolutionary one.

Katherine Pandora (University of Oklahoma)

The Intimate Scientist: Vernacular Contestations of the View from Nowhere

There is a historiographic familiarity to assertions that the rise of modern science is marked by claims of objectivity, produced by disembodied intellects who testify to facts of nature with detachment, either due to their ability to discipline their emotions or by insulating themselves from emotional engagement by producing knowledge through mechanical media or validating it in the cold, unforgiving light of impersonal statistical equations. What has been less well-studied by historians of science are claims on behalf of “the intimate scientist,” for whom the pursuit of scientific knowledge is embedded within conditions that demand personal engagement and an intimacy with the realities under study in order to secure truths about elusive facts of nature. In this presentation, I suggest that this vernacular image of “the intimate scientist” was initiated with widespread popularity through media tropes in the popular press about the horticulturist Luther Burbank at the start of the 20th century, and was carried forward, for example, in the work of such collaborators as novelist John Steinbeck and marine biologist Edward “Doc” Ricketts (co-authors of The Sea of Cortez, 1941) and in Rachel Carson’s mid-century nature writing, and then renewed for a cinematic age in Hollywood’s depiction of Robert Stroud (the “Birdman of Alcatraz”) and in National Geographic’s television specials on primatologist Jane Goodall. Analysis of these claims on behalf of “the intimate scientist” will tell us much about the significance of natural history in the sociology of scientific knowledge, but will also reveal important epistemological contestations that hearken back to the philosophical tenets of the “radical empiricism” enunciated at the turn of the century by William James, and which have yet to be fully appreciated by historians of science.

David Pantalony (Canada Science and Technology Museum)

Propaganda or Education? The Controversy over the Importation of Soviet Scientific Instruments to America in 1959

Soviet educational scientific instruments were sold in the United States for a very brief period in 1959. An American instrument dealer bought them from the Ministry of Education in Moscow with the intention of selling them to American colleges. Before he could sell only a handful, however, they were impounded by U.S. Customs. There was a lively exchange in the U.S. Senate about the dangers of Soviet propaganda, and the importer was called before a hearing on Capitol Hill. A bill was passed preventing schools from buying communist instruments and the remaining supply was destroyed. The instruments that came to America were part of impressive post-war changes in Soviet science education and the mass production of Soviet scientific equipment. Following the launch of Sputnik, science education suddenly became one of the heated battle grounds of the Cold War. Lobbyists for a protectionist American instrument trade used this moment to strengthen their grip on American science education. This talk is based on artifacts found at Dartmouth College, Harvard, the Bakken Museum and the Canada Science and Technology Museum.

Buhm Soon Park (National Institutes of Health)

Science as a Weapon in the War against Disease in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

A new pattern of patronage in the medical sciences and related fields emerged in the late 1940s as the U.S. government geared up to expand its support of research programs along the lines of disease categories. This paper explores the origins, workings, and limitations of the “categorical approach to medical research,” which became the modus operandi of federal funding through the National Institutes of Health. Although the expression of research problems in terms of disease categories rather than scientific disciplines provided a bridge of understanding between the world of science and the world of politics, the administration of large-scale public funds this way was never a simple matter. At stake was the identity of the rapidly growing NIH. Should it be a science agency or a health agency? How much should it get involved in the control of disease and the delivery of health care, vis-à-vis the support of research and training programs? A set of interactions among medical scientists and practitioners, research administrators and health lobbyists, and the executive and legislative branches of the government was in play as they sought to define the mission of the NIH for their own purposes. The debates became intensified after the 1965 Medicare legislation, culminating in the separation of the NIH from its parent agency, the Public Health Service, three years later. I argue that NIH’s internal organization and its place in the federal bureaucracy both influenced and responded to the changing public perceptions of science in the war against disease.

Mina Park (Seoul National University)

A Factory of Spectroscopy: George R. Harrison’s Automatic Machines and the MIT Wavelength Tables

The MIT Spectroscopy Laboratory in the 1930s is a very interesting place where routine works of physics laboratory can be revealed and where the influence of the Great Depression on the day-to-day work of a laboratory can be examined. From 1932, Professor George Russell Harrison, the director of the Laboratory, invented automatic machines to measure, record and sort spectrum lines that would eventually replace laborious, tedious and time-consuming human works by machines. This automation increased the speed of measurement enormously and made possible the mass production of spectrum lines. With his invention, Harrison launched the wavelength table project in 1935. Securing support from the Work Progress Administration, he employed 140 unskilled WPA workers for the project. In 1939, the Spectroscopy Laboratory published the MIT Wavelength Tables.  This paper will examine Harrison’s laboratory work by using an analogy between laboratory and factory. The analogy implicates the concept of automation, division and systematic organization of labor, product marketing, and managerial ideals. It is a good example to illustrate how American physicists struggled to prove its utility during the Great Depression when physics was blamed as “the science of death” causing economic difficulty and unemployment. Harrison’s laboratory created jobs for unemployed laborers and its product, MIT Wavelength Table was targeted for practical workers in industrial laboratories. In short, his ‘factory of spectroscopy’ was directed to prove physics as “the science of life.”

Hyung Wook Park (The University of Minnesota)

The Shape of the Human Being as a Function of Time": Mathematics and Theories in Peter Brian Medawar's Research on Immunological Tolerance and Aging

The English biologist Peter Brian Medawar is renowned for his two major achievements, the demonstration of immune tolerance and the proposal of an evolutionary theory of aging. For the former, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1960 with Frank Macfarlane Burnet. But the Prize engendered a skewed image of Medawar, although it conferred great honor. Many historical accounts of Medawar give an impression that he was a quintessential experimentalist despite more complex nature of his methodology, since these accounts usually focus on his tissue transplantation experiments that confirmed Burnet's theoretical prediction and thus earned him the Prize. Medawar's research on skin homograft for burned patients during World War II further strengthened his image as a practically oriented experimenter, especially in contrast to Burnet, who was known as a "great theoretician" and "biological thinker." This paper argues that Medawar was an ingenious theoretician as well as a great experimentalist. Particularly, he was a mathematical theorist, who was influenced by several leading British scholars, including R. A. Fisher, D'Arcy Thompson, Karl Pearson, and J. B. S. Haldane. Medawar used mathematics for diverse purposes-to determine the probit mortality of transplanted tissues from their survival times, to calculate the minimum number of antigens involved in the graft rejection, and to confirm that his experimental results were statistically meaningful. This paper focuses on Medawar's uses of mathematical theories in analyzing the changes of the living organism over time. I argue that his theory of senescence, which opened a new area of research on aging, was a direct result of his efforts to understand the evolutionary changes of an organism's mode of growing old in mathematical terms. This paper also suggests that his research on immune tolerance was based on his earlier work that used both experimental and mathematical approaches in analyzing the changing fate of homograft in a developing organism. By illustrating how mathematical theories can be fruitfully used in the study of the nature of living organisms as growing, aging, and evolving entities in time, this presentation aims to enlarge the understanding of the uses of mathematics in biology and human sciences, which have been studied by historians Theodor Porter, William Provine, and Sharon Kingsland.

Emily Pawley (University of Pennsylvania)

Profitable Bodies: Images, Proportions and Animal Forms in Agricultural Improvement, 1810-1860

The popularity of elite animal breeding and the rise of transatlantic markets for purebred animals during the early nineteenth-century supported a massive trade in images of animal bodies in Britain and America. Animal portraiture became a genre of painting in the Royal Academy; engravings of improved breeds hung on parlor walls; and cheaper copies appeared in agricultural manuals, periodicals and advertisements. Examining discussions of these images reveals the ways that improving farmers and professional breeders interpreted animal forms, particularly the forms of cattle. The focus of an intense aesthetic interest, the “conformations” and colors of cattle signified not only their pure breeding, but also their economic potential. Where a yellow circle around a Devon ox’s eye meant untainted ancestry, its slender horns and ‘fine’ leg bones demonstrated that it would not waste valuable matter in the production of valueless parts. A broad chest meant a powerful nutritive system, and, borrowing from the language of physiognomy, a clear, mild eye strongly indicated “a disposition to fatten.” Accurate proportions and tints in images were thus key to the communication of this kind of natural knowledge. This paper explores how cattle images were understood to illuminate a strand of morphology that historians of Victorian science have largely neglected; one that described animal forms not as evidence of design or adaptation but as sites for the economical production of valuable matter. In doing so, it argues for the significance of agricultural knowledge as form of Victorian natural knowledge.

Sharrona Pearl (Harvard University)

Seeing Clearly: Illumination on the Nineteenth-Century Stage

With the introduction of gas lights to the East London theatre at Wellclose Square in 1816, stagecraft changed. Under the glare of harsh lights, actors had to improve the quality of their costumes, change their makeup, and reorient their staging. They also had to consider new competitors for the attention of their audiences – the scenery and illumination effects, which often acted as additional characters in the play. In this paper, I will explore the relationship between theatre lighting technologies and the production of stage scenery in the first half of the nineteenth century, as actors and managers were adjusting to the new light. I will consider in particular role of the audience, and debates around their perception of the stage, in the development of scenery and lighting for a given play. Initially, gas lights caused tremendous consternation among the theatrical community, as they worried that audiences would see too much. With the increasing sophistication and importance of scenery and set design, the concerns of actors changed; they worried that, overshadowed by dazzling effects, they would not be seen enough.

Kim Perez (Fort Hays State University)

Nature as a Field for Fiction": Mabel Osgood Wright's Response to the Nature-Faker Controversy

In her December 1905 article for the New York Times Review of Books, nature writer and conservationist, Mabel Osgood Wright weighed in on the ongoing nature-faker debate; at the heart of this controversy were the issues of how nature should be presented in nature literature and who had the authority to represent nature. In response to John Burroughs’ pointed criticism of fanciful nature writing, she argued that he “made one grave error, that of taking the point of view of the quasi scientific observer of nature’s methods, instead of that of the naturalist facing a rather new literary phase where nature was seized as a field for fiction.” While Wright respected the authority of science in representing the natural world, she did not believe it to be the only method. In her narrative nature field guides, Citizen Bird and Four-Footed Americans, and her nature stories for children, Tommy-Anne and the Three Hearts and Wabeno the Magician, Wright allowed for a more subjective language when describing the life histories and behaviors of plants and animals, although the actual facts represented must be in line with the reality of nature. She allowed animals to be imbued with human characteristics, language, and emotions. By balancing the factual and fanciful treatment of the natural elements, she created a realistic portrayal of nature that a reader could learn from, but also it encouraged the reader to relate to nature.

Michael Pettit (University of Toronto)

“The Unobserved but Observing Observer”: The Psychologist as Deceptive Performer and the Search for Natural Responses

In many ways, deception was the defining methodological aspect of twentieth-century social psychology: experimenters would intentionally mislead their subjects and create ornate simulated situations to elicit valid responses. Drawing on examples from earlier in the century, I examine the complex historical relationship between deception, objectivity, and authenticity in the pursuit of experimental knowledge. I contrast the use of deception in the debunking of spiritualists with its use in the testing of moral character among children. In both these cases deception is two-sided: simultaneously a behavior to be studied and understood in the experimental subject and a methodology used by experimenters. Participants, like University of Wisconsin psychologist Joseph Jastrow, conceded that the truthfulness of the observer did not necessary lead to truth, but could rather work against it. While developed to meet the circumstances of particular problematic and crafty subjects, such an approach became increasingly normalized within psychological practice. The use of deception was part of a strategy for observing “natural” human responses without contaminating the situation with the laboratory’s artifice or the experimenter’s expectations. The psychologists involved in these early cases contemplated the ethical and epistemological stakes in sacrificing “scruples” for accuracy and objectivity. I highlight how such a move involved the incorporation of the methodologies of commercial actors such as the detective and the magician into experimental psychology. My investigation contributes to our understanding of the historically specific relationships between experimenters and their subjects, the historical epistemology of the human sciences, and the moral underpinnings of scientific inquiry.

Stephen Pyne (Arizona State University)

IGY: Announcing a Third Great Age of Discovery

The polar regions were the last of the Earth’s surfaces to be explored, and thus effectively conclude what William Goetzmann has termed a Second Great Age of Discovery. What began as a 3rd Polar Year, however, quickly evolved into an International Geophysical Year, and IGY announced a Third Great Age of Discovery for which Antarctica in particular would be a point of inflection before plunging into the deep oceans and interplanetary space. Ice, abyss, space – these would be the geographic realms of the Third Age; Modernism, its uneasy intellectual syndrome; and a reliance on remote sensing and robots, its means. A defining trait of the Age is not only the absence of indigenes but of any sustaining biota.

Chitra Ramalingam (Harvard University)

Electric Instantaneity: Spark Illumination and Photography in Nineteenth-century Britain

The desire to capture instantaneous images of transient phenomena was present at photography’s inception, but in its earliest days moving objects left only elusive phantoms on the photographic surface. The first successful photograph of a rapidly moving object was performed with theatrical flair by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1851. In a darkened lecture hall at the Royal Institution, Talbot captured a sharp, readable image of a spinning copy of the Times, employing the sudden flash of light provided by an electric spark.  This paper examines a series of encounters between this electric instantaneity and photography, starting with Talbot’s collaboration with Michael Faraday on this first spark photograph and ending with Arthur Worthington’s famous photographs of liquid splashes in the 1890s, when spark photography had became a standard image-making tool for scientists interested in the transient.  It thus explores the role of the electric spark in realizing the photographic fantasy of stopping time—enabling what the physicist Charles Vernon Boys would later call the “electro-photographic eye”, surpassing the human eye in its ability to capture and comprehend the transient. Electricity, and the sudden illumination provided by the electric spark, thus had a key role in forging photography’s identity as a medium that could capture the single instant.

Peter Ramberg (Truman State Unversity)

Halle Circa 1850: The Intersection of Religion, Popular Science, and Education

This paper will explore the broader social, cultural and educational circumstances by which the future German chemist Johannes Wislicenus (1835-1902) chose a career in science. Wislicenus grew up in the city of Halle between 1841 and 1853. Halle had long been associated with theological and educational movements, and during the 1840s, there were a number simultaneous movements in theology, education and science popularization that converged there. Wislicenus’ father, Gustav Wislicenus, became deeply involved in the free-thinking theology movement derived from David Friedrich Strauß’ Life of Jesus (1835), and founded a free congregation after leaving his position as pastor of the Laurentiuskirche. In 1847, Wislicenus founded the journal Kirchliche Reform, a vehicle for the “promotion of the religion of humanity,” emphasizing the centrality of the current scientific worldview to religious thought. Also in Halle in 1853, the free-thinker Otto Ule founded the popular science journal Die Natur. Finally, the young Johannes Wislicenus participated in the rigorous mathematical and scientific curriculum of the Realschule at the Franckesche Stiftungen. It is in this context of these multiple circumstances in the cultural, educational and religious life of Halle and in the personal life of the young Johannes Wislicenus, that we can begin to understand his choice of a career in science and, more generally, the formation of a scientific “personality.”

Brigit Ramsingh (University of Toronto)

Food science and the Codex Alimentarius Commission (1962-1970)

The Codex Alimentarius, or “food code”, and its parent standard-setting body the Codex Alimentarius Commission was established in 1962 by the UN’s Food and Agriculture and World Health Organizations. One of the guiding principles of Codex was to base its standards on science and endorse "scientifically proven methods" for testing food samples. In its early years Codex has been referred to as functioning like a "gentleman’s club", because, despite its politicized environment, disagreements over standards rarely arose or impeded the work of the committees. Codex committees drew upon the expertise of international multi-disciplinary teams of science professionals: microbiologists, chemists, public health inspectors, veterinarians, and medical doctors in order to develop food standards of a voluntary nature, issued in the form of advice to governments. Although food standards, legislation, and some food science schools had already emerged by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Codex discussions brought international attention to these scientific methods, and placed great emphasis on food as an area of scientific inquiry. Drawing upon archival material from Codex committees, I will describe how experts from many disciplines collaborated and conducted their work on establishing international food standards, and also suggest that Codex provided a forum in which “food science” could be further legitimated as a discipline. 

Renee Raphael (Princeton University)

Teaching Galileo’s 1638 "Discorsi" at the University of Pisa, 1638-1658.

This study will examine how Galileo’s final published work, his 1638 Discorsi (Two New Sciences) entered and altered Italian university teaching in the first ten years after its publication. Drawing on extant manuscript notes and published teaching texts, this paper will analyze how two different professors at the University of Pisa incorporated Galileo’s text into their teaching of natural philosophy and mathematics. This analysis will reveal that their use of the text concentrated on Day 1 of the work – and thus Galileo’s science of materials and resistances – rather than Galileo’s second and, according to modern standards, more noteworthy science of motion. By identifying specific characteristics of these teaching texts, including precise passages incorporated and the authors’ attitude to Galileo’s work, this analysis will turn back to Galileo’s text, in order to suggest what specific characteristics led these professors to read and teach it as they did.

Friederike Boockmann (read by Patrick Boner) (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften)

Johannes Kepler's Horoscope Collection

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, astrology reached new heights. The famous astronomer Johannes Kepler, for example, devoted a considerable part of his career to astrology. As a result of Kepler’s activities in this field, there remain several well known astrological works written by him: theoretical treatises, predictions in calendars, as well as astrological discussions in his learned correspondence. Nearly unknown is Kepler’s private collection of horoscopes, which includes almost 1,000 birth charts for nearly 900 individuals, along with many elaborate calculations and commentaries. This collection can be found among the unpublished papers of Kepler, which today are kept in St. Petersburg at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Kepler-Kommission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich is currently preparing a critical edition of Kepler’s horoscope collection for the next volume of its Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke. The following paper will present the first results of my work on this project. Having studied astrology at the University of Tübingen, Kepler further expanded his expertise in Graz, where he was commissioned with the annual publication of astrological calendars. He also collected the birthdates of nobles and men whose lives were known to him; in particular, he examined the horoscopes of families, including his own. Later on, as the (often unpaid) Imperial Mathematician of Emperors Rudolph II and Matthias, he earned his livelihood from calculating horoscopes for various individuals. The most famous among these individuals was Albrecht von Wallenstein, who eventually became Kepler's employer.

Brian Regal (Kean University)

Scientific Authority in Dubious Realms: Grover Krantz and the Anomalous Primates

Physical anthropologist Grover Krantz (1931-2002) spent a career arguing that the anomalous North American primate called Sasquatch was a genuine animal. Mainstream science viewed the Sasquatch as at best a relic of folklore and at worst a hoax. As a result Krantz and his career were dismissed and ignored by mainstream anthropology. What is more interesting, and less expected, was the negative reaction Krantz received from amateur Sasquatch researchers. Krantz’s program was to take the study of anomalous primates and put it on a firm zoological footing, something the amateurs had been calling for. At the same time he strove to situate himself as the academic authority in a field of non-academics: to enter their knowledge domain and make it his. He would do this by applying the methodologies of physical anthropology—including the multi-regional hypothesis of human evolution—to the problem: methodologies and theoretical models outside the experience of most of the amateurs. He was threatened, cursed, and was once referred to as the ‘Falstaff’ of the field for his efforts. This paper is not an attempt to prove or disprove the existence of Bigfoot. Rather, it will explore why Krantz’s natural allies within the ranks of the amateur Sasquatch research world would, for the most part, reject him as much as professional scientists did. It will look at the role of scientific authority at the epistemological boundaries between mainstream and fringe science

Brianna Rego (Stanford University)

The Polonium Brief: A Hidden History of Cancer, Radiation, and the Tobacco Industry

On November 23, 2006, former KGB operative Alexander Litvinenko died in London of radioactive poisoning from the rare isotope polonium 210. As concern grew that others had been exposed, the British Health Protection Agency reassured that there was “no radiation risk” to the general public. This statement, however, is misleading, as more than one billion people worldwide expose themselves daily (and most often unknowingly) to polonium. The vector of this mass irradiation is not a vengeful government, nor an adversary in the style of Cold War espionage, but rather something far more common and ordinary: cigarettes. The first scientific paper on polonium in tobacco was published in 1964, and it launched an extensive debate within the scientific community and the tobacco industry alike. Despite forty years of research suggesting polonium is a leading carcinogen in tobacco, however, there has been minimal public awareness of the issue. Although it is certainly striking that the tobacco industry has not made a definitive move to reduce the concentration of radioactive elements in cigarettes, it is equally striking that it has had no pressure from the government or the medical and public health communities to do so. It is the aim of this paper to trace the parallel stories of scientific research on polonium in cigarettes from the 1960s through the 1980s and the tobacco industry’s responses to this research, as revealed through the extensive internal industry documents available through litigation.

Chris Renwick (University of Leeds)

Patrick Geddes and the Challenge of Defining Sociology in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain

In the late nineteenth century men of science believed that they were on the verge of substantiating the science that would finally bring order to society: sociology. However, the biggest challenge facing sociology’s enthusiasts was explaining how the new science was different from existing ways of studying social phenomena, such as psychology, economics and biology. In this paper I will explore how the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) – one of the most important figures in early British sociology – tried to solve this problem. Now most commonly remembered for his pioneering work in town planning and his significant role in shaping the work of Lewis Mumford, Geddes was a biologist who regularly made important contributions to the social sciences. In writings predating those of his more celebrated contemporaries, including Emile Durkheim, Geddes claimed that sociology was necessary because no other science recognised or studied the distinct reality of the social sphere. I will argue that Geddes’ concern with such theoretical issues challenges the traditional historiography of sociology, which presents the British interest in the subject as being strictly empirical. Moreover, I will suggest that Geddes’ desire, as a biologist, to make sociology an independent discipline provides an important insight into the often unconsidered ways that late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century men of science thought science should be used to answer social questions.

Jim Ritter (Université de Pais 8 / Institut Mathématique de Jussieu)

Mathematizations of the World Picture: Mathematicians in Unified Fiel dTheory 1920-1930

It is generally admitted that general relativity inaugurated a new symbiosis I mathematics, particularly geometry, and physics. But in fact the modalities of this relationship, and even the fundamental objects put into play, were far from being uniform. I will examine this question from the point of view of groups around two mathematicians – Oswald Veblen at Princeton and Élie Cartan in Paris – who, in the 1920s, tried in quite different ways to use geometry to participate in Einstein’s attempts to develop a single unified physical theory. In doing so I will discuss how the mathematicians conceptualized their new role in physics and how their efforts were received by physicists.

Stuart Leslie amd Robert Kargon (Johns Hopkins University)

The Laboratory, the Clinic and the Studio: Spaces of Inquiry in Three Eras

Laboratory studies traditionally draw upon sociology and/or anthropology for their methodological frameworks. What does the laboratory look like from the perspective of business and organizational theory? Borrowing from recent studies of the firm, including models of path dependency, entrepreneurial behavior, and choices between core competency and diversification, and from Stewart Brand’s ideas about ‘how buildings learn’, this paper will attempt to distinguish three kinds of laboratories, the ‘low road’ (flexible, ad hoc, open-ended, flat structure), the ‘high road’ (single purpose, hierarchical, clearly defined research goals) and the ‘no road’ (deliberately symbolic, highly visible, politically driven), using historical examples from selected academic, corporate and government laboratories.  Some attention will also be given to the social limits of learning.

Stefan  Roehle (Mainz University)

Relativity in Leiden: the Role of Willem de Sitter

The Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter is well known for his now famous controversy with Einstein between 1916-18 when relativistic cosmology was born. In this context his name is remembered for the cosmological model he created as a counterexample to Einstein’s physical intuitions. Although this dispute has been covered by historical research, de Sitter's larger role in advancing relativity has not received close attention within the mainstream of Einstein studies. My research aims to show his central importance for research on relativity within the Leiden scientific community. Like Eddington, de Sitter was one of the few astronomers who had the educational background and interests necessary to pursue both the special and general theories of relativity. He began work on the relativity principle (Einstein's first postulate for SRT) already in 1911; two years later he tried to bolster Einstein's second postulate by providing evidence for the constancy of the velocity of light. Yet even older are de Sitter’s interests in gravitational theories which can be traced back to 1908. Moreover, he closely followed Einstein’s attempts to construct a field-theoretic approach to gravitation, including the controversial Einstein-Grossmann theory of 1913. These circumstances clearly show that de Sitter’s more famous work on the general theory of relativity was a consequence of his prior research rather than a result of the sudden interest in Einstein's theory that emerged in 1916.

Joy Rohde (University of Pennsylvania)

Counterinsurgency on Contract: Project Camelot and the Politics of Cold War Social Knowledge

In 1965, Army officials and social scientists embarked on an unprecedented research effort. Code-named Project Camelot, this multi-million dollar study promised to illuminate what many believed was the root cause of instability in the developing world—communist-led revolution. Camelot was designed to harness state-of-the-art social knowledge to the extension of democracy. But before planning was complete, it precipitated a minor international incident and was unceremoniously cancelled by Robert McNamara. This unexpected turn of events brought into public view the fraught relationship between scientists and the state in the Cold War. Camelot’s researchers had hoped to forge a hybrid professional identity that seamlessly united the Cold War military mission with a commitment to disinterested science. But in fact, security classification clashed with scholarly openness; the operational demands of the military conflicted with free-ranging scientific inquiry; political urgency collided with scientific detachment. In this paper, I argue that the ways that Camelot’s researchers reconciled these conflicts had important implications for the meaning and place of expert knowledge in the state. Camelot’s demise revealed a fault line that had developed in the social science community between academics and the researchers who worked on contract with Pentagon. The scholars who objected to Camelot intended to permanently sever the ties between social science and the military. Instead, their attacks brought these two groups even closer together, and drove a wedge between contract researchers and academic social scientists. Military-funded social scientists continued to support the Pentagon’s mission while their academic peers withdrew from political action.

Patricia Rosof (Hunter College H.S. (retired); Independent Scholar)

Straddling Boundaries: The Scientific Career of Dr. Florence Rena Sabin

Dr. Florence Sabin (1871-1953) spent her life working in male-dominated institutions where she was often a path-breaking woman: the Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she was the first woman full professor, the Rockefeller Institute, where she was the first woman full Member, the National Academy of Sciences, where she was the first woman member, and the American Association of Anatomists, where she was the first woman President. In each instance she had a generally supportive and collaborative relationship with her male colleagues. She favored co-educational professional gatherings and medical schools. On the other hand, many of her close friendships were with women, including women doctors and former medical students, a nurse, and artists. Her social gatherings when she lived in New York were at the women’s Cosmopolitan Club. She advocated for women’s causes and after her retirement from research for public health. In that arena she showed particular awareness of the important role of the public health nurse as well as of women’s clubs. As a woman accepted and even lauded in a man’s world, and a recipient of numerous honors from women, Sabin’s life indicates the possibilities and challenges of a medical research career for women in the first half of the twentieth century.  

Karen Ross (Presbyterian College)

The Laboratory’s “Rich Harvest”: Snake Venom and Experimental Immunology, 1900-1904

Simon Flexner’s first major investigation as the chair of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania was a program of snake venom research that contributed to the ongoing debates over the nature of the immune response in the early twentieth century. He was one of the first Americans to play a significant role in the international field of experimental immunology, which was largely divided among followers of Paul Ehrlich and Jules Bordet. This research not only launched Flexner’s international reputation as an experimentalist, it also reveals how Flexner interpreted the value and standards of experimental research. As one of the most active proponents of scientific medicine in the United States, Flexner argued that to make medicine truly scientific, research would have to move into the laboratory and adopt the experimental methodology of the basic sciences. He sought to break from the perceived empiricism of an earlier generation by grounding his research in the experimental method – a method which Flexner argued produced certain knowledge. However, by examining Flexner’s snake venom research and through transnational comparisons with other investigators, I demonstrate the uncertain nature of what was meant by <i>scientific</i> in this transitional period. I evaluate the development of standards of practice in the laboratory, standards of significance for experimental data, and the use of animal models as substitutes for human subjects.

Michael Rossi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Corpus: Porpoise or, Cetaceans and the American Museum, 1907 - 1969

This paper uses the production of model whales at the American Museum of Natural History from 1907 to 1969 as a stepping-off point from which to examine tactility as a metric of scientific truth. Much has been written about the ways in which visual representations are used to communicate scientific ideas and enforce regimes of accuracy and authenticity. But for audiences to look upon "the first and only authentic portrait of a whale in existence," as one article put it, required a leveraging not only of the visible, but also of the tactile. It required plaster casts of cetaceans taken by properly vetted scientists, skilled sculptors revisiting dead whales in life-like papier maché, audiences overawed by the physical charisma of the largest creatures on earth, and attention to (if not sympathy for) the corporeal being of a species rapidly disappearing from the Earth’s oceans. Employing archival sources and contemporary periodicals, I use whale bodies as stepping-off points from which to examine those other senses deployed by museum exhibitors in the face of subjects which at every turn confounded attempts at visual nomination.

Aviva Rothman (Princeton University)

Kepler's Conversation with the Past

This paper focuses on Johannes Kepler’s approach to the past, and to the knowledge possessed by past thinkers. In many ways Kepler’s understanding of the past appears to be a historical and contextual one, with a focus on the progress of history which exalts modern over ancient. At the same time, there are, throughout his writings, many instances where he displaces the ancients from their contexts, reads them in highly anachronistic ways, and holds them up as the exemplars of true knowledge. In order to resolve this seeming contradiction, the paper examines Kepler’s approach to the past by relating it to his understanding of a priori and a posteriori knowledge, the unity of truth, and the role of divine inspiration. Kepler, who described himself as a priest of God reading the Book of Nature, believed that though both reason and observation are contextually bound, divine inspiration can serve to free men from the confines of history, allowing them to access aspects of the universal harmonic truth that would otherwise evade them. This notion of inspiration motivates many of the instances where he reads ancient knowledge, both religious and scientific, in seemingly anachronistic ways.

David  Rowe (Mainz University)

On Contextualizing Einstein Studies: Max von Laue's Role in the Relativity Revolution

Whereas countless studies have been devoted to Einstein’s work on relativity, the contributions of other major protagonists have received surprisingly little attention. Within the immediate German context, no single figure played a more important role in developing the consequences of the special theory of relativity (SRT) than Max von Laue. Picking up essentially where Einstein left off, his initial research culminated in the first edition of Das Relativitaetsprinzip (1911). Building on Minkowski’s 4-dimensional electrodynamics, Laue introduced a general Welttensor that would later provide the essential physical entity Einstein needed in order to build his gravitational field equations. Like many others, Laue was slow to accept the premises of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Only after the British confirmation in November 1919 did he take up GRT in earnest. During the ensuing controversies that swirled around Einstein, Laue defended his ideas against the attacks of anti-relativists, including Philipp Lenard. But he also criticized pro-relativists, especially Max Born, for promoting the new “Einstein cult.” When it became too dangerous for Einstein to appear at the 1922 centenary Naturforscher meeting in Leipzig, he asked Laue to speak in his place. Lenard and co. responded by circulating a flyer protesting the celebration of a theory anti-relativists viewed as non-scientific. As a service to the larger physical community, Laue added a second volume to his text on SRT covering the general theory, the first advanced textbook on this subject written by a theoretical physicist. This long overlooked volume represents a document of central importance for understanding the relativity revolution.

F. Rowland (University of California Irvine)

Stratospheric Ozone Depletion, Greenhouse Gases and the IGY

Two of the year-long research efforts during the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58 were extended indefinitely after its close, and became of great value thirty years later because they established baseline documentation for measurement of changes in the atmosphere. The British Antarctic Survey placed Dobson ultraviolet instruments at surface locations near Halley Bay (75.5&#61616;S, 27&#61616;W ) on the coast, and Faraday ( ) in the peninsula. The Halley Bay results during the IGY identified the very strong Antarctic polar vortex, and then in 1985, recorded the rapidly diminishing stratospheric ozone contents within this vortex. The latter finding played a critical scientific role in demonstrating ozone losses attributable to the man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which led to the United Nations Montreal Protocol which essentially terminated the global manufacture of CFCs and their release to the atmosphere. Measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide was attempted by many during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, but quantitative measurement and evaluation eluded them until C. David Keeling established stations during 1958 on the side of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and at the South Pole for the IGY. During the first three years, the Hawaiian data showed the 2% annual fluctuation in concentration (maximum in May, minimum in November) caused by photosynthesis in the northern hemisphere during the spring/summer growing season. During the same period, the South Pole carbon dioxide data indicated an increasing atmospheric concentration. Measurements of carbon dioxide over the first decade showed a steady increase, with no cyclical variation other than the annual one. During the 1970s, concern arose about the enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect from the still increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide. These concerns were amplified by the steady acceleration in the yearly growth of carbon dioxide, and then by the separate discoveries that methane, nitrous oxide, the CFCs and tropospheric ozone—also greenhouse gases--were each increasing in concentration as well. Control systems (e.g. the Kyoto Protocol) for the growth of greenhouse gases are slowly being developed, but to date have not made much impact in the atmosphere. 

Paul Rubinson (University of Texas at Austin)

“Scientists Wearing the Cloak of Science”: Activism, Objectivity, and Nuclear Weapons, 1954–1963

The escalation of the arms race during the 1950s allowed nuclear weapons to dominate U.S. foreign policy, economy, and even culture. As the guardians of nuclear knowledge, scientists were essential to U.S. national security. Consequently, American Cold War science was not an objective, isolated endeavor, but rather a contested form of expertise mobilized in the name of national security. Two scientists actively tried to shape science and scientists during the thermonuclear age. Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, used a grassroots campaign to mobilize scientists as a force for disarmament. In 1957 Pauling secured the names of 11,000 scientists for a petition to stop nuclear tests, indicating widespread support. Letters from Pauling’s personal papers, however, reveal that many scientists bristled at this politicization of science and openly questioned issues of politics, activism, objectivity, and science itself. At the same time, physicist Edward Teller, the so-called Father of the H-bomb, worked to secure for scientists and nuclear weapons a prized place within the national security state. Evidence from Teller’s papers reveals that by molding the composition of science advisory panels, exploiting connections to military figures, and even influencing government science awards, Teller helped strengthen science’s relationship with the military-industrial complex. These rival campaigns, I argue, acted as an abstract debate over the meaning of science. At the same time, this debate was a concrete struggle to align science behind competing ideologies. Pauling’s “science of morality” and Teller’s conservative anticommunism both confronted the amorphous group known as “the scientific community,” an encounter that transformed the relationship between science, the state, and society.

Martin Rudwick (University of Cambridge)

On taking the 'geological deluge' seriously; or, Geology Without Genesis

Gillispie's Genesis and Geology has influenced the historiography of early nineteenth-century geology for over fifty years. But the book was quite properly limited in scope, in ways that its readers have not always adequately appreciated. It was confined to the (rather peculiar) British scene, and focussed on the interactions between British geologists and the wider anglophone public, rather than on the expert debates throughout the multilingual (and notably francophone) scientific world of the time. In this paper I try out the historiographical experiment of relegating 'geology-and-Genesis' issues to the subordinate position they held in the practice of most geologists. Specifically, I review the contemporary arguments in favour of the historicity of an exceptional watery catastrophe, often termed the 'geological deluge', at a recent point in the unimaginably lengthy history of the earth. The 'deluge' was generally attributed, in impeccably naturalistic style, either to an episode of sudden crustal collapse or to a drastic mega-tsunami. It embodied a serious and fruitful scientific theory, which was only partially superseded by the later theory of a geologically recent Ice Age. Whether the 'deluge' had been recent enough to have been recorded, however obscurely, in early human traditions (possibly including, but not only, that of Noah's Flood) was a separate issue and much more controversial.

Gina Rumore (University of Minnesota)

Of Ice and Men: A Historical Geography of Field Science in Glacier Bay, Alaska

When choosing sites for field research, scientists often claim that particular physical features and processes make the site ideal for their scientific studies. While these abiotic and biotic features of a landscape certainly are a significant factor in field site selection, this paper argues that often times social and political factors play an equal or more important role in shaping the geography of places selected for field research. In this talk I analyze the various social and political factors that shaped the cultural landscape of Glacier Bay, Alaska, into an ideal place for long-term glaciological and ecological studies, beginning in the 1890s and 1910s, respectively, arguing that, based purely on scientific criteria, Glacier Bay was not nearly as ideal a site for such research as other areas of Alaska. Specifically, I will look at how European and American exploration, popular writings, and political preferences interacted with the physical aspects of the land to carve out a place for field science in a landscape shaped by glacial ice.

H. Darrel Rutkin (Stanford University)

Changing Curricular Patterns: Astrology and the Italian Universities, ca. 1300-1800

Astrology wove together the traditional disciplines of natural knowledge—mathematics, natural philosophy and medicine—in premodern Italian university curricula: medieval, Renaissance and early modern. Focusing on the universities of Pisa, Padua and Bologna, I will first describe the traditional curriculum based on Pietro d’Abano’s writings and the 1405 Bologna statutes. Then I will focus on astrology’s changing circumstances in the curriculum during the 1570s and ‘80s, while Galileo studied mathematics inside and outside the universities. I will examine curricular patterns and extracurricular practices at Pisa, Padua and Bologna, and within the burgeoning Jesuit educational network. Finally, I will sketch astrology’s complex status in the 17th and 18th century curriculum.

 

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