History of Science Society

2007 Annual Meeting

Abstracts S-Z

Funke Sangodeyi (Harvard University, History of Science Dept)

Diet as Destiny in Colonial and Post-Colonial Nigeria: Nutrition, Biopolitics and “the African Mind”

My paper will trace the development of nutrition science and discourse in Nigeria from the “discovery” of malnutrition in Nigeria (and in Africa in general) in the 1920s through the nutritional policies of the late colonial government and the first republic of Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s. First, I will examine the reconceptualization by colonial doctors of ‘the African’ as having a vulnerable body and a fragile psychology (as opposed to a healthy body and untroubled psychology) due to malnutrition; second, the transfer of the rhetoric of biological essentialism to that of nutritional deficiency by colonial psychiatrists attempting to characterize “the African Mind” in an increasingly Africanist/nationalist context; third, the increased focus on nutritional and behavioral studies after World War II; and finally, nutritional policy as an avenue of national development in the late colonial and post-colonial contexts, with particular focus on improving the “protein status” of the population. The question of what Nigerians should eat was a cultural, political and economic question. Nutritional policy and practice can elucidate the underlying structures and assumptions of a government as well as its concept of its citizenry. Examining nutritional policy and practice in the developing world, in the pre- and post- colonial context of a single polity will provide insight into two different kinds of biopolitical societies, the continuity between them and the transition from one into another.

Tiago Saraiva (Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon)

Laboratory Fascist Fields: Plant Breeding and Colonization in Portugal (1936-1974)

The present paper aims to put in relation the work done inside the walls of plant breeding laboratories and the transformation of landscape in Portugal and Mozambique. It will blend the typical history of science approach of looking into detail to scientists’ practices with more recent environmental history studies concerned with the historical nature of landscapes. By paying attention to how the development of new seeds in the laboratory brought with it new relations between society and the environment, it will track the ways scientists became major players in the fascist project of inventing new ties between man and the landscape. Be it the creation of a rural Arcadia in Portugal or the imperial ambitions in Eastern Africa, plant geneticists were fundamental in developing and selecting seeds for the wheat fields of the Alentejo region (South of Portugal) or the cotton plantations of Northern Mozambique. More than just to suggest that plant breeding was a tool for fascism; the aim is to understand it as a crucial part of the history of fascism.

Rose-Mary Sargent (Merrimack College)

Science in the Public Interest: The Relationship between Baconian Experimentalism and the Common Good

Francis Bacon developed a method of experimental practices that reflected his goal of achieving a non-utilitarian version of useful knowledge. The relationship between his method and his goal will be shown through an examination of The New Organon and his natural histories. Although fundamentally fallible, Bacon argued that his method was more reliable than other extant methods for acquiring knowledge that could be used to produce natural effects through artificial means. Once one was able to produce such effects in a consistent manner, it would then be permissible to implement the knowledge gained by the experimental process, not for commercial or political gain, but for the benefit of all of society’s members. The interpretation presented here takes account of the relation between Bacon’s method and goals and makes questionable the common belief that he advocated a simplistic inductive methodology devoted primarily to disinterested fact gathering and the mechanical discovery of empirical, law-like regularities. It also explains more fully why he was opposed to an over-reliance on mathematics and the construction of elaborate philosophical systems. Subsequent generations of English natural philosophers shared Bacon’s goal and also recognized the need for a complex and dynamic method to achieve it as will be shown by a brief account of how Robert Boyle, within the public sphere of the Royal Society, and Humphry Davy, through his public demonstrations at the Royal Institution, sought to encourage others to embrace this Baconian ideal.

Tilman Sauer (Einstein Papers Project, Caltech)

Number Theory, Geometry, and Electromagnetism: Hilbert's Perspective on the Unity of Science

In his 1917 lecture on "Axiomatic Thought," Hilbert recapitulated his own work on the foundations of physics and his proposal of an axiomatic unification of gravitation and electromagnetism at a biographical juncture when he turned his full attention to the metamathematical program of proof theory. The paper will discuss Hilbert's achievements in physics in light of his original motivation which was to provide an axiomatic foundation of physics that would ensure at the same time its unity and inner consistency.

Sara Scalenghe (Indiana University-Bloomington)

Paracelsus in Ottoman Medicine: The Case of Ibn Sallum (d. ca. 1670)

The narrative that predominates in the historiography of medicine in the early modern Middle East continues, perhaps surprisingly, to contend that the state of medical knowledge declined dramatically during the centuries of Ottoman rule, and that physicians of the period were oblivious to contemporary medical and scientific developments occurring in Europe. This paper challenges that long-standing narrative by examining the work of an influential Arab physician who has received minimal scholarly attention to date: Salih b. Nasrallah al-Halabi, better known as Ibn Sallum (d. ca. 1670). Ibn Sallum was born and educated in Aleppo, where he practiced medicine until moving to Istanbul. There, Sultan Mehmet IV (r. 1648-1687) appointed him Chief Physician. Ibn Sallum’s masterwork, Ghayat al-itqan fi tadbir badan al-insan (The Culmination of Perfection in the Treatment of the Human Body), is a large medical encyclopedia composed in Arabic and subsequently translated into Turkish. It enjoyed enormous popularity among subsequent generations of both Arab and Turkish physicians. Ibn Sallum’s contribution to Ottoman medical knowledge was of great significance: he is credited with nothing less than the introduction European “chemical medicine” into Islamic medicine. In fact, Book Four of his Ghayat al-itqan consists of Ibn Sallum’s translations into Arabic of the works of European authors influenced by Paracelsus, including Daniel Sennert, Johann Jacob Wecker, and Oswald Croll. This paper demonstrates that, in addition to such noteworthy and consequential efforts at translation, Ibn Sallum’s Ghayat al-itqan features throughout a careful blending of traditional humoral medicine and the “new chemistry.”

Mark Schiefsky (Harvard University)

Structures of argument and concepts of force in the Mechanical problems

I will begin with a discussion of the author's conception of a 'mechanical problem' as a situation in which a small force overpowers a large weight. The explanation of all such problems, the author claims, lies in the nature of circular motion: specifically, the fact that a point on the circumference of a larger circle moves more quickly than one on a smaller circle, assuming the circles turn about the same center at the same angular speed (the 'circular motion principle'). The author carries out a highly systematic reduction procedure, arguing that the circle explains the balance, the balance the lever, and the lever practically all other mechanical devices. I will present an overview of the way in which this reduction is carried out via the identification of the three basic 'models' of circle, balance, and lever throughout the text. Finally, I will use a close analysis of the linguistic formulation of the circular motion principle to draw some conclusions about the author's conception of force and the terminology in which it is expressed. My presentation will draw heavily on tools for the analysis of electronic texts developed in the context of the Archimedes Project (http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu).

Thomas Schlich  (McGill University, Dept. Social Studies of Medicine)

Fixing the Biomechanical Body: Rationalized Fracture Treatment in WWI

During WWI the Austrian surgeon Lorenz Böhler established a thoroughly standardized and rationalized system of fracture care that made him world-famous later on. In this context, he treated the wounded soldiers’ bodies like broken machines whose proper function he was aiming to restore. His treatment too was conceived as a machine-like routine, reminiscent - and obviously influenced by - contemporaneous Tayloristic ideas. He used procedures which were thoroughly standardized and optimized, both in terms of the gestures of treatment and in terms of the materials used. Prominent among these materials were devices that immobilized the fracture while allowing for very specific and well controlled movements of the patient’s body, thus mirroring the body machine in a real machine. Böhler documented the treatment methods and their results in large numbers of photographs. These photographs embody his approach. The treatment looks like being performed in an assembly line. The restored bodies look like industrial mass products. In our paper we are going to examine Böhler’s concept and his photographs as to how they fit in with the conventions of treatment and photographic documentation in orthopedic surgery at the time and discuss their relationship to early twentieth century industrial rationalization efforts.

Rikke Schmidt Kjaergaard (Steno Institute, University of Aarhus)

Stem Cell Spin: Covering “the Hwang Affair”

Already famous for producing the first cloned dog, South Korean science celebrity, Woo Suk Hwang, generated worldwide headlines in 2005 sensationally claiming to have created 11 human embryonic stem-cell lines genetically matched to individual patients. In 2006 he was found guilty in scientific misconduct. There has been little debate about the details of the story, but the events have been interpreted very differently as local narratives unfolded in various contexts. Covering the two years from February 2004 to February 2006 this paper analyses the differences and similarities in newspaper articles in two national settings (South Korea and Denmark) and news articles in two leading scientific journals (Nature and Science). This study demonstrates that local conditions play a significant role in the way straight news stories about science and technology are framed, regardless of whether the media is a national newspaper or a scientific journal. The national coverage needs to be seen in the light of one country rising from poverty to high tech wonder and the other by being the home of the sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. The scientific coverage by Nature and Science is heavily influenced by who initially published Hwang’s results leaving an image of two competing professional journals with rather different takes on the story and the morals to draw from it. By highlighting the challenges we face in writing the history of recent biomedicine this paper contributes to the understanding of how news narratives evolve and to the dialectics of science, media and the public.

Michael Schüring (University of California at Berkeley)

The Shadow President: Ernst Telschow and the Post-War Transformation of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society

A chemist by training and former assistant of Otto Hahn, Ernst Telschow became the most powerful figure in the administration of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society (KWS) after 1933. He was a party-member and official in Hermann Goering’s Four Year Plan administration, and oversaw the integration of the KWS into the research agenda of the NS-Regime, serving as an indispensable mediator between scientific and political interests. Although heavily criticised by refugee scientists and critics within the KWS, Telschow managed to remain in his position after 1945. He pulled the threads behind the successful re-establishment of the organisation as Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and unremittingly formed its self-image as an institution for basic research with an unblemished political past. He negotiated with the British occupying power to help set up the society’s headquarters and a number of institutes in Goettingen, using the untainted reputation of Otto Hahn and Max Planck for his goals, who themselves helped Telschow through the denazification process. His relentless networking within a cartel of political exoneration rendered any attempt to remove him from office in vain. Telschow remained a highly respected advisor for the MPS even after his retirement in 1960, serving as a manager during the founding phase of the Society’s large and prestigious Institute for Plasma Physics. Telschow‘s biography is exemplary for the functional elite in the early Federal Republic of Germany. Like many others he was able to make use of his management skills acquired during the Third Reich within the new political system.

James Secord (University of Cambridge)

The Astronomer's Scrapbook

Albums filled with newspaper clippings, prints, letters, circulars, and other ephemera are some of the most treasured archival resources used by historians of science. Yet the scrapbook has never received serious attention in its own right as a significant form in the sciences. This paper surveys the use of such albums generally, and then focuses on three mid-nineteenth century examples taken from astronomy: the celbrated "Neptune file" of the Astronomer Royal George Biddel Airy; the book of clippings and prints compiled by W. C. Bond at Harvard; and the album of Hannah Jackson-Gwilt at the Royal Astronomical Society. For those who made them, these scrapbooks offered a vital means of appropriation, with texts and images given new meanings through juxtaposition; for historians, they provide unique insights into reading practices and the relations between different forums for scientific communication.

Ariel Segal (University of Maryland, College Park)

Romanticism, Religion, and Geology: Edward Hitchcock on the Sanctifying Role of Science

Rev. Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864)'s contributions to geology and paleontology, as well as his attempts to harmonize Genesis with geology, have been researched in some depth by Emma Rainforth, Stanley Guralnick, and Rodney Stiling. However, two aspects of his work have been largely unexplored: his overall view of the study of science as a sacred calling and the passionate romanticism that found its way even into the geological surveys he conducted in Massachusetts between 1833-1841. He included in those surveys a section first entitled “Topographical Geology” and later “Scenographical Geology” in which he wanted to “call the attention of gentlemen of taste, intelligence, and leisure, to those striking features of our scenery, that are the result chiefly of geological changes, and which produce landscapes abundant in beauty and sublimity.” He wanted educated laymen to use their free time exploring nature rather than spending it in pursuit of illicit “civilized” pleasures. Thus, he rhapsodized about the various natural wonders of Massachusetts. This romanticism extended to his religious ideas, especially in his magnum opus of science-religion reconciliation, The Religion of Geology and its Connected Sciences (1851). In this work, he proposed that the true “Christian philosopher”/scientist would be allowed to finally see the ultimate truths of science in heaven. Hitchcock viewed the emergence of geology as a science as a vital stage in God’s plans for humanity, giving men "great enlargement to our knowledge of the divine plans and operations in the universe."

David Sepkoski (University of North Carolina Wilmington)

Darwin's Dilemma: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Paleontology, 1859-1945

Paleontological and geological evidence were vitally important to Darwin in establishing his theory of evolution, particularly because the historical evidence of the fossil record enabled him to argue for temporal evolutionary succession. Yet in what appears in retrospect to be a profound irony, Darwin had a major hand in condemning paleontology to second-class disciplinary status. One of his greatest anxieties was that the ‘incompleteness’ of the fossil record would be used to criticize his theory: that the apparent ‘gaps’ in fossil succession could be cited as, at the very least, negative evidence for the gradual and insensibly graded evolution he proposed. His strategy in the Origin, then, was to scrupulously examine every possible vulnerability in his theory, and as a result he spent a great deal of space apologizing for the sorry state of the fossil record. This is what I am describing as ‘Darwin’s Dilemma,’ and it had a major impact on the approach to the study of the fossil record taken by paleontologists and biologists in the decades after 1859. However, many paleontologists did contest Darwin’s negative assessment of the fossil record and its value to evolutionary theory. This paper will examine paleontological attitudes towards the fossil record from the late 19th century to the groundbreaking work of G.G. Simpson in the 1940s, and will argue that a strong tradition of advocacy on behalf of both the adequacy of the fossil record and paleontology’s unique contribution to evolutionary theory predated the Modern Synthesis. Nonetheless, I will also argue that concerns about the fossil record contributed to paleontology’s relegation to ‘handmaid’ status within the developing community of evolutionary biology.

Jole Shackelford (University of Minnesota)

Severinus’ Paracelsian Seeds: Mechanical Actors on the World Stage

To understand fully the genesis of what has been termed mechanical philosophy – one of the key elements of the ‘new science’ of the seventeenth century – we must understand what ‘mechanical’ meant and how the language of mechanics was deployed in late Renaissance conceptions of nature. Traditionally this has been studied within two main conceptual frames: mechanics as the mathematical study of motion, and mechanics as the conception that the natural world is a machine of sorts, and that its behavior is determined by the physical interactions of otherwise inert material components. However, it is clear that the term mechanical was used in another sense by the Danish physician Petrus Severinus, whose theory that changes in bodies are governed by vital ‘mechanical’ agents endowed with ‘mechanical knowledge’ that directed ‘mechanical processes’ was widely read and assimilated by seventeenth-century natural philosophers and medical theorists. This use of the term, adopted by Van Helmont, Gassendi, and many other prominent writers, presented a conception of mechanical that was neither mathematical nor related to inert machinery, but rather was a vitalistic conception tied perhaps to the increasing prominence of artisans in late Renaissance and early modern production. This paper will present Severinus’ conceptualization of mechanical and the meaning and context of this idea in his philosophy, arguing that he drew both on his reading of the works of Paracelsus and on the contemporary perception of the natural world as a theater for ‘mechanical’ activities. Severinus’ conception of mechanical as vital agency will then provide a basic orientation for the papers that follow in this session.

Hanna Shell (Society of Fellows, Harvard University)

Chameleonic Cinema: Filming the Science of Strategic Concealment

This paper considers the way in which models of scientific objectivity (and the distrust thereof) are simultaneously inscribed in, and prescribed by, filmic modes of instruction in counter-surveillance practices – which is to say camouflage. I consider how modes of seeing and being in the world as a scientific, narrative and military subject converge as counter-surveillance practices become embodied and encultured. Experimental filmmaker and animator Len Lye’s Kill or Be Killed, a 1942 soldier training film sponsored by the U.K. Ministry of Information, and produced as part of the Realist Film Unit in association with Basil Wright and Paul Rotha, is exemplary in this regard. Lye’s sniper training film dramatizes a deadly encounter between a British soldier and a German soldier through precise physical action and narration that serves to suture the experience of the viewer with that of the on-screen camoufleur. Here camouflage training is enacted as an acute performance of oscillation between observation and concealment, spectatorship and retreat – principles that underlay military tactics, scientific objectivity and cinema practices alike.

Matthew Shindell (University of California, San Diego)

Astrogeology in Translation: Constructing Extraterrestrial Frontiers in the Early Years of Planetary Science.

In the 1950s and 60s, Planetary Geology allowed some geologists to work outside of the mainstream, outside of the methodological constraints that the plate tectonics revolution seemed to dictate. Isolated as they were from the mainstream by their new subject and the NASA-funded institutions that sheltered them, some of planetary geology’s founders saw planetary work as an opportunity to use the planets as a proving ground where traditional methods, properly applied, could find the answers that quantitative, theory-driven methods alone could not – that the work that came before plate tectonics was not backward, but an essential stage of exploration – that the change in the field was not in fact a sudden paradigm shift, but the gradual refinement of understanding. They demanded that geology involve observation, description, discovery, exploration and experimentation. This required them to redefine the term "geology" in a way that would include planetary exploration, and to define new methods as continuous with the methods of traditional field geology and stratigraphy. In essence, they had to make a case for field geology and at the same time extend the field to the planets. This involved the marshaling of methodologies old and new, as well as a reworking of the history of the discipline. This paper looks at the work done by Astrogeologists and planetary geologists in the beginning of the Space Age to define themselves as a part of the planetary science community, while not wholly apart from the community of terrestrial geologists. It chronicles how Astrogeologists successfully enlisted the planets and the technologies of planetary exploration (human and robotic) in their effort to translate their work to suit the needs of multiple communities, including NASA scientists and engineers, the USGS, and the geological community.

Peter Shulman (Johns Hopkins University)

Swamps, Surveying and Security: The Maritime Origins of American Forest Conservation

This paper explores the intersection of science, politics, and national security in 19th century American state-building by examining the forgotten origins of American forest conservation. In 1799, only one year after the creation of the American Navy, Congress directed President John Adams to purchase forested land bearing valuable live oaks as timber reserved for naval construction. Adams selected forested islands in South Carolina and Georgia, and as the nation grew, additional naval timber reserves were established in Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida. At every step, Washington depended on scientific surveys to locate, classify, represent, and manage the new reserves in what became the U.S.’s first experiment with conservation. Over the 19th century, however, these efforts would ultimately prove beyond the capacity of the weak central government, leading Gifford Pinchot to deride timber conservation as “a somewhat unusual occupation for the Navy.” I seek to restore the perceived importance of forest conservation in the early 19th century and to capture the role and centrality of surveyors as mediators of the natural world. In their explorations, these surveyors translated unfamiliar landscapes into public policy while grappling with the limits of objective knowledge. I argue that while these scientific conservation surveys were central to projecting federal authority into newly acquired territory, the government’s subsequent weakness in managing the timber land undercut support for federal conservation policies until the close of the 19th century. By focusing on surveying and exploration, this paper inserts the question of conservation into a dynamic debate over national security, partisan politics, resource scarcity, and the little-known frontier scientific surveys of a rapidly expanding United States. This paper draws on original, hand-illustrated journals and reports of surveyors preserved in the National Archives, along with maps, forest inventories, original correspondence, and published government documents.

Ana Simões (Center for the History of Science, University of Lisbon)

The Appropriation of Relativity by the Portuguese Astronomer Melo e Simas (1870-1934)

The expedition headed by A.S. Eddington to observe the 1919 total solar eclipse and test Einstein’s light bending prediction took place in Principe, a tropical island in the west coast of Africa, then a Portuguese colony. No Portuguese astronomer accompanied Eddington, despite attempts to do so. The expedition acted as a catalyst for the network of Portuguese astronomers, and especially for those associated with the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon. In their appropriation of relativity, ranging from acceptance to rejection, Portuguese astronomers were sensitive to those aspects of the theory which impinged on their scientific interests as practitioners, and all incorporated aspects of the theory in their popularization activities. The astronomer and military man Melo e Simas was no exception to the rule in what concerns popularization of science. But contrary to his colleagues he tried to incorporate relativity in his own scientific practice, and attempted to measure the bending of light rays bordering Jupiter’s surface (1923) in order to find an extra confirmation for Einstein’s prediction. In this talk, the case of Melo e Simas will be used to discuss the specificities of the process of appropriation of relativity in a European periphery such as Portugal. Not just an astronomer, Melo e Simas was a multifaceted man who incorporated scientific, educational and popularization activities in a coherent life project which should not be isolated from the social and political context of the First Republic (1910-1926) in which he enthusiastically participated.

Rivers Singleton (University of Delaware)

Harland Goff Wood and American Biochemistry

My goal in this paper is to address questions of biochemistry’s disciplinary origin during the later half of the 20th century. My major focus will be on the way that Harland Goff Wood (1907-1991) brought the biochemistry department at Western Reserve University Medical School (WRU) to national prominence in a way that reflects Robert Kohler’s view of biochemistry’s “discipline building” in the United States. Kohler (From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline,) cogently argued that the disciplinary explosion of biochemistry, as a “biomedical discipline,” in the 20th century was due to a shift in research focus away from topics of interest to clinicians (i.e. “medical chemists”) to topics of more fundamental biological significance. At WRU, biochemistry’s disciplinary evolution, as seen in institutional budget data and correspondence, clearly supports Kohler’s view. In 1944, Joseph Wearn, WRU Medical School Dean was charged to “rehabilitate” the school and curriculum. In order to “rehabilitate the biochemistry program he created an empty budget line for a new “Department of Clinical Biochemistry.” The following year he transferred the salary lines for all members of the existing “Biochemistry Department” – made up primarily “physiological chemists” – into the new clinically oriented department. Over the following years Wearn restaffed the, now empty, “Biochemistry Department” with a “modern” general biochemist, Harland Wood, who had a free hand to build a department reflecting “modern” biochemical practices. Within a decade Wood built the department into one of national distinction. While Kohler’s schema clearly described the discipline’s evolution at WRU, biochemistry at other institutions, such as the University of Georgia, followed a different path. Creation of the Biochemistry Department at that institution was very much a political process. Beginning in 1953, several biochemists joined the Chemistry Department faculty. By the early 1960's there were a number of individuals, both in Chemistry and elsewhere in the University, who considered themselves “biochemists.” A lobbying effort developed to create a free standing Biochemistry Department in order to “modernize” the institution.

Thomas Soderqvist (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen)

Beyond Contextualism: The Concrete Individual as a Focus Point

This presentation investigates the role of the genre of writing about individual scientists (biography) in relation to the writing of historical accounts of science (historiography). From the vantage point of professional history of science, scientific biography is normatively considered an auxilliary genre to science historiography (an ancilla historiae) and as a tool for contextualizing science in history. Such a normative perspective makes it difficult to appreciate the full richness of the genre, however. In practice, biographies of scientists have also been written as contributions to understanding singular lives, e.g., for commemorative and eulogistic purposes, as moral investigations, or as tools for understanding oneself. These generic roles – which have been prominent throughout the history of the genre and are also operative in biographical writing today – may be more or less overlapping in the same biographical work, but their analytical separation may help improve the critical evaluation of the genre, e.g., in biographical book reviewing practice. Most importantly, these generic roles point to a reversal of the function of the ancilla historiae role of the genre, viz., that the historiography of science can as well be seen as an ancilla historiae a mere context for understanding individual scientists, their ambitions and expectations.

Michael Sokal (Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Emeritus))

Psychology as a Biographer's Tool: Developing Insights into Scientific Careers

As biographical historians of science seek to understand more fully the course of their subjects’ scientific careers and the evolution of their ideas, they can profit from insights into human cognition and character developed by 20th-century psychologists. This presentation focuses on the scientific career and ideas of James McKeen Cattell – the eminent experimental psychologist and long-time editor of Science -- to illustrate this claim. For example, Cattell’s temperament – formed and reinforced through his boyhood – helped shape his editorship of Science and, over many years, affected the journal’s changing standing among American scientists. In this instance, the psychological concept of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” can help biographical historians of science understand and present Cattell’s editorial practices and policies in a way that clarifies just how Science’s role in American science varied through the 20th century. Perhaps more interestingly, a fuller psychological understanding of Cattell’s “identity formation” reveals the roots of his personal inability to introspect, in any sense of the word. This handicap led him in the 1880s to abandon his mentors’ vocabulary and laboratory procedures and to create alternatives that came close to revolutionizing experimental psychology. Reflecting this influence, many later psychologists followed his lead, and their own research programs set their science’s course at least through the 1960s. The case of Cattell thus illustrates how a biographer’s consideration of psychological analyses can shed productive light on the evolution of a subject’s scientific ideas, with fruitful results for our understanding of science’s past

David Spanage (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

Imperialism, Piracy, and Science Upon the High Seas in the 1700s

Two 18^th-century archetypes survive into the 21^st century, which are rarely coupled in our consciousness: the swashbuckling pirate and the Enlightenment natural philosopher. This paper seeks to examine some dimensions of overlap between these twin manifestations of European global exploration during the 1700s. There is a familiar narrative. Discovering new continents and new opportunities for cultural exchange with Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Europeans famously re-thought the place of the individual in society and politics. With the rise of the nation-state came the transformation of international trading and marketing patterns, mercantilism, and imperialism on a global scale. But how often do we contemplate the circumstances of lawlessness on the high seas?  Like privateers, intrepid scientists typically operated in moral gray zones, negotiating tensions between legal norms and political imperatives.  They sought to divine the mysteries of the oceans’ winds, catalog the stupendous diversity of Earth’s biogeography, secure friendly havens (whether through trade or intimidation), and otherwise harvest all the world’s “buried” treasures. Beginning with the travels of freebooter William Dampier, first published in 1697, European eyes were opened to the fantastic opportunities a fearlessly curious individual might encounter. Besides negotiating with different peoples and cultures, empire builders needed to appreciate the geography, prevailing conditions, the dangers, and the natural resources to be found in new and distant places. Generations of pirates and expedition scientists followed in Dampier’s wake, drawing upon a widely shared if vaguely defined moral economy of risk-taking and acquisition.

John Stachel (Center for Einstein Studies, Boston University)

Rise and Fall of Einstein's Hole Argument

When late in 1912 Einstein decided that a non-flat metric tensor was needed to incorporate gravitation into relativity theory, he turned to his friend Marcel Grossmann for mathematical help. Grossmann introduced him to Riemannian geometry and the tensor calculus as developed by Ricci and Levi-Civita. The concepts of parallel displacement and affine connection are better adapted to Einstein's vision of the equivalence principle, but they were developed only after the formulation of general relativity. Their absence caused a number of difficulties that delayed the development of general relativity, notably in formulating the Newtonian limit. In reaction, Einstein developed the hole argument against generally covariant gravitational field equations in 1913, and spent two years looking for a non-generally covariant formulation of them. As a result and of mounting difficulties including criticism by Levi-Civita, Einstein returned to general covariance in late 1915 and, helped by Kretschmann's work, used the point-coincidence argument to evade his earlier hole argument. The success of general relativity led to a revolution in differential geometry, led by such mathematicians as Levi-Civita, Weyl, Cartan, and Whitney. Today, such concepts as differentiable manifold, fiber bundles, and sheaves enable us to formulate Einstein's vision of general relativity in a mathematically precise form.

Maxi Stadler (Imperial College London)

A.V. Hill and the Discipline of Interwar Biophysics

 In recent years, the mid-century, cross-disciplinary constellation ‘biophysics’ has attracted sustained historical attention, almost exclusively, however, of revisionist-minded historians of molecular biology, focusing too, in tendency, on the post-WWII period. While this has significantly widened the range of actors, episodes and activities coming under the purview of historians, ranging from cell physiology to ecology to physical medicine, less attention has been paid to interwar incarnations of ‘biophysics’; or, if so, from the dominating historiographical perspectives of physics and/or molecular biology. Interest by historians here reflects, among others, the development of instruments and techniques, but involved too, a great deal of concern with the philosophical musings of quantum physicists.
  This paper complicates these familiar depictions of interwar biophysics, its imports, and its meanings. Focusing on A.V. Hill, Foulerton Research Professor of the Royal Society and head of a ‘biophysics research unit’ at University College, London, I locate the practices, culture and attractions of British interwar biophysics in the context of pedagogical controversies that waged around the ‘discipline’ of biology around 1930. Specifically, Hill’s interwar campaign for ‘biophysics’ and an ‘intellectually respectable’ biology, it is argued, reveals that the case of British biophysics cannot be read exclusively as an instruments-driven research enterprise; but has to be seen, very much so, as a solution to the pedagogical problem of advancing the biological sciences in an environment that traditionally had esteemed the physical sciences as a pedagogical ideal and model of ‘mental discipline’. 

Ida Stamhuis (Free University Amsterdam)

WSA-I and the History of Women Scientists in Europe

In the early 1990s, when I began to study the history of women in science in Europe, one of the very first books I came across was Margaret Rossiter’s Women Scientists in America, 1880-1940, which provides an indispensable background for researching the history of women scientists in other countries, including my own, Holland. First, I will look at reviews of WSA-I published in various European journals. My initial impression is that considerable differences prevailed across European countries, depending mainly on their orientation towards American studies. Second, I will study the influence of Margaret’s early work in several European studies of on women in science, such as Mineke Bosch Het geslacht van de wetenschap (The gender of science); published in Dutch in 1994, while stating “More than all the other investigations this [Margaret’s] book served as an example”); Renate Tobies’s edited volume Aller Männerkultur zum Trotz (Notwithstanding Male Culture); published in German in 1997) and my own work on the Dutch geneticist Tine Tammes (1871-1947), a case study illuminated by Margaret’s insights into the ‘The Matilda Effect in Science’. Third and last, I conclude with a brief recollection of Margaret’s influence in Europe, not only through WSA-I and her other early work, but through her support for the Women’s Commission of the DHST/IUHPS, an international organization in the history of science, of which Margaret served as its first President (elected in 1981 at Bucharest). Since Margaret’s work and Margaret as a person cannot be separated, I will describe her encounters with and encouragement of European historians of women in science at ICHS in Zaragoza, (1993) to the effect that the Commission has held by now half a dozen meetings in Europe (Greece 2007; Poland 2006; Czech Republic 2004; and Hungary (several times).

Matthew Stanley (Michigan State University, Lyman Briggs School of Science)

Against "The Material Spirit of the Age": Maxwell's Rejection of Scientific Naturalism

James Clerk Maxwell is justly remembered for his manifold contributions to physics, but his evangelical Christian faith is often forgotten or dismissed as superficial. However, Maxwell saw his religious beliefs as integral to his work as a scientist and teacher. In particular, he felt it was extremely important to refute the naturalistic agenda of Huxley, Tyndall, and their allies. He argued against the sufficiency of materialism and for the scientific necessity of recognizing human consciousness and volition. He saw naturalism as a dangerously misleading path for science and thought Tyndall's reductionism would blind one to important truths about the natural world. Maxwell's approach to these issues was carefully considered and he always sought to assert both the power of science and the validity of religion without discarding either. His goal was to show that scientific explanations could never be adequate on their own: they would always need to be supplemented and supported by religious and humanistic thought. This was especially important in his approach to science education. The purpose of science education was not, as the X-Club would have it, to construct a new scientific totalizing foundation for human knowledge, but rather to direct students back to traditional social and religious values. Surprisingly, Maxwell's work was embraced by the very naturalists he was trying to battle, creating an interesting tension between theological and materialist approaches in Victorian science.

Thomas Stapleford (University of Notre Dame)

Numbers, Rules, & Liberalism: Labor Statistics and American Industrial Relations, 1900-1950

Historians of statistics like Ted Porter and Alain Desrosières have drawn our attention to the links binding quantified knowledge to both bureaucratic action and liberal ideals. In this paper, I extend these frameworks by developing perspectives from Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy, which emphasizes how putatively “rational,” rule-based administration (including statistical calculation) has been used to mediate between liberal, democratic ideals and the need to coordinate collective action on a large scale. Drawing upon this theoretical background, I show how labor economists and labor statistics (wages, prices, hours, earnings) moved from the margins of nineteenth-century industrial relations to become central components of a highly bureaucratic, centralized system of collective bargaining by mid-century, as liberal businessmen, union leaders, and reformers attempted to retain (or tolerate) collective organization while constraining industrial conflict via “rationalization.” I argue that both the stability and form of this system was contingent. The success of rule-governed, empirically-grounded industrial relations derived not from unambiguous economic principles and facts but from the political and economic pressures that drove both many unions and certain companies to recast their struggles into a rationalized system. Furthermore, the particular form of rationalization varied with both political context and economic structure: from state-centered systems during World War I, to firm-centered pluralism in the 1920s, and finally to state-protected, large-scale collective bargaining in the late New Deal.

Hallam Stevens (Harvard University)

Seeing Sequences and Picturing Proteins: Visualization Techniques in Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics relies on a variety of techniques for comparing nucleic acid and protein sequences and for visualizing their three-dimensional structure. This paper focuses on two techniques: Distance Matrix Alignment (DALI) for protein sequence alignment, and the UCSC (University of California at Santa Cruz) Genome Browser. Bioinformatic tools are not merely straightforward or obvious ways of ‘seeing’ parts of organisms. Rather, this paper will argue that bioinformatic images are constitutive of biological knowledge in two different ways. First, visualization techniques play a crucial role in mediating between biological artifacts (protein and DNA molecules) and information artifacts (algorithms, binary code, database structures). Images, which possess different meanings for the biologist and the computer scientist, facilitate the cross-disciplinary translation necessary for the hybrid field of bioinformatics. Second, the images used in bioinformatics are not representations but computations: they are ways of doing rather than seeing. Pictures of proteins and sequences are the results, rather than the starting points, of analysis. Yet, crucially, these images are what biology ‘looks like’ to many practitioners of bioinformatics. These pictures set the parameters for how the biological world is classified – the forms of life that emerge from bioinformatics depend on visualizations. As a consequence, historians and anthropologists of the biological sciences need to shift attention away from the metaphors associated with biology-as-text and towards new sets of metaphors embedded in these images.

Michael Stoeltzner (University of Wuppertal)

The Axiomatic Method as a Critical Enterprise and the Quantum Controversy

The axiomatization of quantum theory was an important topic both around 1930, when von Neumann wrote his Mathematical Foundations, and from the 1960s on, when Wightman, Haag, and Kastler started the axiomatization of quantum field theory. In-between there was less interest for both mathematical physics and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. While von Neumann had intended to resolve interpretational problems by way of the axiomatic method, the motivation for axiomatic QFT, however, was to end the hand-waving treatment of divergences. Since the approach of Haag and Kastler has entered the interpretational debates only recently, it was commonly believed that the finality claim inherent in the Copenhagen interpretation was intimately tied to the axiomatic method as such and responsible for von Neumann's "faulty" no-hidden-variable theorem. This chimed in with the overall perception of von Neumann as a conservative and as an exponent of the military-industrial complex, while Bohm's alternative interpretation was seen as political and scientific dissent. However, also the axiomatic foundations of quantum field theory for a long time remained a fringy topic that was launched by young dissenters from the German main stream represented by Heisenberg. Moreover, there is ample evidence that von Neumann repeatedly changed his understanding of quantum theory and that he, unlike Heisenberg, did not reject Bohm's theory from the outset. But he casted his positive ideas – that would become seminal for the Haag-Kastler program – and his skepticism about probability in the quantum domain in mathematical terms that were inaccessible for those leading the interpretational discourse.

James Strick (Franklin and Marshall College)

Lessons from the Living Cell: Export of Proteins from Cells and Debates over Artifact in Electron Microscopy, 1967-2007

Beginning in 1967 physiologist Stephen Rothman found steadily accumulating evidence contradicting the dominant model of protein secretion from cells such as exocrine glands. The vesicle model of secretion, first described by George Palade in the mid-1950s, depended upon data from cell fractionation/ultracentrifuge studies, correlatedwith electron microscope observations. Rothman's experiments suggested the vesicle model might be based largely upon artifact from those disruptive techniques, and he insisted that control observations based on physiologically intact cells and tissues confirmed this and suggested alternate means of protein export from cells. Rothman described the vesicle model as a Kuhnian paradigm, further solidified by the award of 1974 Nobel Prize to Palade; the disputes continued a further three decades since. This paper will examine the controversy and evaluate Rothman's claims that the "black box" of electron microscopy is still subject to reopening on some major issues today.

Claudia Swan (Northwestern University)

Imported Knowledge: Fragments of the New World in the Context of Dutch Collections 1585-1625

This paper treats materials that were accumulated (and circulated) by a variety of scholars and professionals living in the Northern Netherlands, and that hailed (the objects, that is) from the Americas. Some of the individuals discussed are: Bernardus Paludanus, Carolus Clusius, and Christiaen Porret. The objects range from naturalia to ethnographic items. One of the principal questions underlying this paper is: how do these objects come to be known? What in the way of knowledge is imported with them? How? And what, in turn, is imparted to them on arrival in the Netherlands?

Edith Sylla (North Carolina State University)

The Proportions of "potentiae" and "velocitates" in Bradwardinian Physics

In volume 1 of her Studies on the Natural Philosophy of the Late Scholastics, in a chapter entitled, “The Concept of Function in the Physics of the Fourteenth Century,” Anneliese Maier wrote that one might almost say that Thomas Bradwardine wanted to write the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica of his century (Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert, 2nd ed. 1966, p. 86, n.10). In his The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (1959), Marshall Clagett made Bradwardine’s De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus a central topic of “Medieval Dynamics.” Maier and Clagett refer to Bradwardine’s theory of the relation of powers, resistances, and velocities as a “rule” and a “law,” and they translate Aristotle’s dunamis and Bradwardine’s potentia as Kraft or “force.” Is this anachronistic? Much has been written lately about natural philosophy and its status relative to mathematics in Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis. To gain a perspective on scientific change when it does and does not occur, we need to study more carefully the relationship between natural philosophy and mathematics in late scholastic authors such as Bradwardine, Richard Swineshead, and Nicole Oresme.

Samuel Talcott (DePaul University)

From Comte to Foucault and Beyond: A New History of the Social Sciences?

New work influenced by Michel Foucault has begun to develop Georges Canguilhem's remark that Foucault, his former student, would have done well to pay more attention to Auguste Comte in his archeology of the human sciences, Les mots et les choses. Guillaume LeBlanc, picking up on Canguilhem's suggestion, has proposed a new history of the social sciences in his L'esprit des sciences humaines (Vrin, 2005), one centered on the problem that the psyche has presented to these sciences. His argument is that, beginning with Comte, the social sciences have wrestled with the psyche, attempting to either disqualify it from investigation altogether, as Comte did, for the sake of producing social science, or to reduce it in some other way in order to make it transparent to the goals of social science. LeBlanc argues that the social sciences developed as sciences of the normal man, proceeding via the investigation of social pathologies, and aiming to produce an understanding of this normal man. Yet, these sciences, according to LeBlanc, failed to eliminate the psyche from their discourse, instead transforming it into novel, different forms, namely, pathological personality types, measured against the normal, social personality. And this entailed, LeBlanc claims, a new conception of the relation between the normal and the pathological, in which there was no longer continuity between them, but only difference. This paper will review LeBlanc's argument for the writing of a new history of these sciences, considering, both its relevance as a critique and continuation of Foucault's own archeological method, as well as its merits and difficulties for informing the way historians and philosophers work on les sciences humaines.

Erki Tammiksaar (Estonian University of Life Sciences)

On Nature's Household: Karl Ernst von Baer's Reasoning about Organisms and Environment

Today the versatile Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876) is well-known as one of the founders of modern embryology, and a critic of Darwin's explanation of evolution. However, his views on Nature's household (biogeography) which closely followed the Kantian conception of physical geography are not yet studied exhaustively. By the 1830s, Baer argued that the manifoldness of animal forms is shaped by environmental conditions in accordance with an energetic balance of Nature's economy. For Example, the individuals of the northern hemisphere greatly outnumber the ones of the southern regions, whereas 'equatorial' species show a much more complex variety of their body forms due to specific climatic conditions. When comparing the animal forms of the two hemispheres Baer conceptualized the morphic difference by a trajectory declining from the equator to both poles. As mountains and deserts confine human populations they also limit animal and plant diversity by segmenting the earth's surface into 'natural provinces' (niches). For Baer, the only predator disturbing these niches such that some species (e.g., the nordic sea-cow), or even indigenous tribes became extinct in short time is the human hunter. His ideas were adopted by many Russian scientists, among them Nikolai Danilevsky, Alexander Theodor von Middendorff, Peter von Köppen, and Leopold von Schrenck, and later stimulated the application of thermodynamics to the environmental sciences. My talk will present an overview of Baerian ideas on organisms and environment which mutually influence the energetic balance of nature. Further, I will demonstrate how his reasoning about nature conservance influenced the Russian government to protect small ethnic groups and to issue laws preserving specific species (fishes).

William Thomas (Harvard University)

Beyond the Science of Warfare: The Origins of Systems Analysis, 1937-1954

Systems analysis had its official origins at the RAND Corporation in the late 1940s. The historiography has widely regarded its creation as an unsuccessful attempt to mathematize and rationalize military procurement policies through the construction of a “science of warfare”. Although connections to prior efforts in systems engineering have been recognized, the motivations of its originator, the mathematician Edwin Paxson, have remained obscure. In a general sense, his work has been assumed to have arisen, almost sui generis, out of a hubristic confidence in quantitative modeling. This paper, however, traces the origins of Paxson’s methods to more modest prewar techniques in equipment design that were encompassed in a “mathematical theory of combat” formulated by a British ballistics instructor named L. B. C. Cunningham and used by the Royal Aircraft Establishment. It examines why this work found an enthusiastic audience at the American Applied Mathematics Panel, for which Paxson worked, and it also explains how game theory served as a ready complement to Cunningham’s methods, and hence the early work of RAND. The paper concludes with a discussion of the eventual departure of systems analysis from its roots in equipment design following criticism of it by RAND economists. This deeper history moves us away from a traditional association of this particular policy science with an inordinate faith in the rationalistic power of quantification, and closer to an understanding of its relationship to everyday practices.

Miao Tian (Institute for the History of Natural Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

“Research of Algebra in China During 1700-1840”

Chinese mathematicians made significant progress in algebra during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One of the most important texts produced in this period, the Siyuan Yujian (Jade Mirror of the Four Elements, 1303), provides methods to solve numerical equations of high degrees with unknowns up to four. This book represents the highest algebraic achievements in China thus far. In the subsequent three centuries, however, there was no notable advance in algebra made in China. In fact, mathematicians in the fifteenth century could not even understand the tianyuanshu, or celestial method, the backbone of the Jade Mirrors of the Four Elements. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Chinese mathematicians realized that the Jiegenfang (Borrowing Roots and Powers of [Unknowns]) algebra introduced by Jesuit missionaries from the West was, in essence, the same as the celestial method. This discovery aroused Chinese interests in their traditional mathematics, especially mathematical texts written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Between the 1790s and the 1840s, several leading Chinese mathematicians explored the origins of algebraic methods by comparing the traditional Chinese methods and those introduced by the Jesuits. They ardently debated on the advantages and disadvantages of those methods. In this paper, I will first analyze the motivations of the mathematicians involved and then discuss shifts of the focuses of algebra in China and relevant historical contexts during the first half of the nineteenth century. Through this case study, I hope to illustrate the course of the modernization of Chinese mathematics.

Xiaoli Tian (The University of Chicago)

Of Church and Hospital: Medical Missions in 19th century China

During the nineteenth century, it was almost entirely Western initiative, mainly in the form of the medical missionary movements, that brought Western medicine to China. In a conservative country with strong anti-Christian sentiments, many Western missionaries regarded the healing art as one of the few effective means of overcoming native resistance to their proselytizing efforts. The medical mission, a new model of evangelizing, was developed based primarily on missionaries’ actual experiences within settings in the south of China. Medicine was deployed to placate native opposition and to promote amicable contacts between the missionaries and the natives.
Medical missionaries were different from other missionaries because they had a twofold role. The treatment of body and the treatment of soul were to be conducted together. Despite initial success, medical missionaries soon found that this arrangement of affiliating the hospital with the church also threatened their success. They drew attention to their particular successes with curing cataracts, removing tumours and bladder stones. However, suspicion and distrust followed the medical missionaries and the medicine they were practicing from their very arrival. Many outrageous rumours appeared concerning the medical practices of the medical missionaries.
This paper argues that the spatial intrusion into traditional communities by missionaries led to distorted imagination. The spatial arrangements of Western medicine were regarded as superstitious or mystical from the perspective of traditional understanding of curing procedure. The sense of “secret place” has profound implications for the difficulties faced by the medical missionaries. This sense of secrecy and the anxieties attached to it were deeply embedded in traditional Chinese society.

Dominique Tobbell (University of Pennsylvania)

“Who’s Winning the Human Race?” Cold War as Pharmaceutical Political Strategy

Between 1959 and 1962, the American pharmaceutical industry was in crisis as Senator Estes Kefauver led a congressional investigation into the alleged administered pricing of drug firms. As its defense, the industry mobilized the rhetoric of cold war and promoted the industry as a critical national asset in the global war against communism. This meant not only framing all that Kefauver sought to change as an attempt to weaken the system of free enterprise, it also meant selling all that the industry did as an exemplar of that system. Thus, the industry hailed itself as a model of American free enterprise and sought, through the development of more and more products and through donations of drugs and other pharmaceutical supplies to aid missions in the Third World, to disseminate its message to those developing nations deemed susceptible to communism. At the same time, the industry argued that any challenge to the system of free enterprise not only threatened the country’s international fight against communism but invited socialism into the domestic political economy. Using congressional documents, internal drug company documents, and the trade press, I contribute an as-yet untold chapter in pharmaceutical history and Cold War biomedical science. I argue that the industry’s strategy to mobilize the rhetoric of cold war helped win the support of Congress and successfully derailed Kefauver’s most radical efforts to increase the government’s control over the drug industry.

David Tomblin (Virginia Tech)

The Role of Restoration Ecology and the Local Ownership of Science in the Cultural Revitalization of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, 1940-2000

My paper explores the role that restoration ecology played in the White Mountain Apache Tribe reclaiming political autonomy over land management decisions on their reservation between 1940-2000. The purpose of this historical case study is to describe the ways the Apache integrated their own cultural values and knowledge about the Apachean landscape with Western scientific knowledge. The White Mountain Apache live on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in east-central Arizona, and like many American Indian tribes, have a long history of scientific and technological exploitation of their natural resources by outside interests. However, as the Apaches slowly gained more control over their natural resources, they increasingly interacted with ecologists and foresters from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs on more or less equal footing. These associations fostered a coevolutionary exchange between indigenous and Western traditions that culminated in a unique brand of ecological restoration by the 1990s. On top of hybridizing their own knowledge and cultural values with those of Western ecologists, one of the most significant contributions the Apache made to ecological restoration projects was how they were implemented - they adapted ecological restoration to serve local needs rather than off reservation interests. By doing this, these projects evolved to perform the dual function of restoring cultural traditions and healing reservation lands long overexploited by off-reservation interests. One of the key lessons learned here is that science that addresses the concerns of the local community rather than non-local interests can achieve positive results. Also, allowing the local community to take ownership of a scientific process such as ecological restoration increases the likelihood that local communities, especially indigenous peoples, will embrace the potential benefits of science.

Alain Touwaide (Smithsonian Institution)

Global Science and International Language: The Case of the Medieval Mediterranean

It is a commonly accepted idea that the international language for science in the medieval Mediterranean world was Greek in the East and Latin in the West. A reexamination of primary sources - texts (particularly medical) in manuscripts - suggests that Arabic became a major language for the practice of science both in the Eastern and the Western Mediterranean as early as the 11th century, allowing for global science. The paper will frame this problem and present concrete cases suggesting that this emergence of Arabic as the vehicle of global science came from the practice of science rather than from a scholarly enterprise of translation.

Katherine Tredwell

The Antediluvian Origin of Astronomy: Josephus, Qumran, and the Lutherans

This paper compares explanations of the origin of astronomy given by Flavius Josephus (37 -- ca. 101 CE), apocryphal texts found among the ancient Dead Sea scrolls, and a 16th-century Lutheran world history called the Chronicon Carionis. The accounts agree in placing the discovery of astronomy prior to Noah’s Flood, but disagree on the details of the discovery. In the Jewish Antiquities, Josephus wrote that Seth and his descendants, being virtuous and long-lived, discovered astronomy. Anticipating the destruction of the world, they preserved their knowledge by inscribing it on virtually indestructible pillars. According to the Dead Sea scrolls, astronomy had two sources: observation of the heavens for timekeeping was divinely revealed to the prophet Enoch, while astrology, a pagan practice, was taught to humanity by fallen angels. The Chronicon retold Josephus’ story, emphasizing the divine sanction of astronomy. Variations in the accounts reveal the differing attitudes of the tellers. Josephus hoped to persuade his educated pagan audience of the sophistication of Jews by portraying Jewish patriarchs as the source of astronomy. The Dead Sea scrolls are believed to have belonged to a separatist religious settlement at Qumran which maintained its purity in part by following a sacred calendar and by shunning pagan influence. Finally, the authors of the Chronicon, who wrote for a Christian audience, inverted the meaning of the Josephan story. Instead of showing that the patriarchs were good because they invented astronomy, they hoped to show that astronomy was good because it originated with the patriarchs.

Jun Tsuji (Siena Heights University)

From the Convent to the Laboratory: Sister Miriam Michael Stimson, OP, and Her DNA Research

In the early 1950’s, Sister Miriam Michael Stimson, OP, a Catholic religious sister and chemist, successfully developed the KBr disk method of preparing chemical samples for analysis by infrared spectroscopy. This chemical method was then used to affirm the structure of the DNA bases and of the double helix itself. Sister Miriam Michael, a woman of simple birth and great intelligence, was an anachronism. While following in the medieval traditions of the Adrian Dominican Sisters, the habit-clad nun performed cutting-edge research in her 20th century science laboratory. From the convent to the laboratory, Sister Miriam Michael brought a distinctly Catholic perspective to her work.  The development of the KBr disk method, for instance, involved several direct allusions to Catholic rituals, devotions, and symbols. Sister Miriam Michael viewed her scientific research as an act of worship, and she believed that ordinary people, events, and objects, even KBr disks, could be revelations of grace.

Roger Turner (University of Pennsylvania)

A Science and Industry of the Air: Airline Meteorology, 1919-1941

Commercial interests have long played a key role in the development of American meteorology. Shipping and agricultural interests most heavily influenced the development of the federal Weather Bureau in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the Bureau focused on forecasting cold waves and monitoring the movement of cyclones which endangered shipping, especially on the Great Lakes. After World War I, however, the nascent air transport industry rapidly became meteorology’s most influential constituency. The emerging airlines used meteorological knowledge to set corporate strategy, manage daily operations, and market flying as a safe and efficient activity. To operate reliably and profitably, airlines required both more detailed weather forecasts and sophisticated new knowledge about the dynamics of the upper atmosphere--the causes of turbulence, squall lines, and ice formation within clouds, for instance. These needs reshaped observing and forecasting practices at the Weather Bureau during the 1920s and 1930s. But the Weather Bureau was not a research organization, nor responsive enough to the urgent demands of aviators. Airlines like Western Air Express (later re-organized as TWA) turned to the few fledgling academic meteorology departments for help. Airlines provided reliable employment to these program's graduates, especially during the Great Depression, while supporting meteorological research both politically and financially. The needs of aeronautics in turn rewarded meteorologists' attention to the physics and thermodynamics of the upper air, helping fashion American meteorology as a research-based scientific discipline built around college degrees and three-dimensional geophysical models of the atmosphere. The operational needs of airlines thus had a powerful effect on the social and intellectual structure of American meteorology.

Christina Turner (University of Notre Dame)

Viewing the Violent Universe: The Development of Gamma-Ray Astronomy

In the last fifteen years, gamma-ray astronomy has evolved from a promising but rather exotic branch of astronomical science to become a mature field of research. Cosmic gamma-ray sources include some of the most extraordinary objects known to humans: pulsars, supernova remnants, accreting black holes, and gamma-ray bursts. Nearly all of our current knowledge of such objects is the direct result of astronomical measurements of the high-energy photons they produce. Satellite-borne instruments that can detect gamma-rays are the basic exploratory tools of gamma-ray astronomy. For decades, however, cosmic gamma-ray sources eluded all attempts at their detection. We will review the early predictions of gamma-ray sources in the 1950s and their serendipitous discovery in the 1960s. Finally, we explore the problems implementing effective gamma-ray instruments and observational techniques and detail the successes of satellite detectors in determining the origin and location of gamma-rays in the universe.

Matthew Underwood (Harvard University)

The Parliament Way of Reformation: Science and Political Economy in Worsley’s Program for Virginia, c. 1649-51

This paper examines the affinitive relationship between the knowledge economy governing English medical practice in the mid-seventeenth century and the political economy espoused by reformist administrators like Benjamin Worsley, a physician, Hartlib associate, and member of the Council of Trade from 1650-51. Through a targeted study of Worsley’s plans to reform the political economy of the Virginia Colony, I argue that both Worsley’s scientific projects and his imperial programs alike were founded on the liberalizing principle of a trade in knowledge and commercial goods that was nominally “free,” but under the regulatory supervision of an authority whose interests aligned with those of society at large. In both contexts, according to Worsley’s reform program, physicians were singled out as those best qualified to occupy the necessary positions of regulatory authority by virtue of their particular occupational expertise and the modes of empirical knowledge production on which their practices were based. Departing from the standard historiographical model that explains the scientific and political activities of Worsley and the rest of the Hartlib circle somewhat narrowly in terms of their Puritan millenarianism, I argue that both Worsley’s science and his politics can be understood in light of his support for an emergent commercial order. I therefore argue that when Worsley promoted “the Parliament way of Reformation,” he was referring to more a mundane goal than that of installing the kingdom of God on earth: namely, establishing and securing, with the help of the new science, a carefully managed commercial order within which England and its dominions would prosper.

Matteo Valleriani  (Max Planck Institute for History of Science)

The Transformation Of Aristotle's "Mechanical Questions" Through The Renaissance Italian Engineers: The Case of Question XVI

Printed technical treatises written by engineers, architects and practitioners circulated widely during the Renaissance, especially from the second half of the 16th century on. Many of these treatises begin with theoretical questions that provide the framework for a discussion of some of the general principles and concrete questions of Aristotle's "Mechanical Problems." Selecting as an example the reception of the Problem 16 on the strength of a piece of timber it can be seen how the early modern transmission of the Aristotelian "Mechanical Problems" was deeply influenced by the theoretical achievements of the practitioners in so far as that considerations of the practitioners were structurally included into the commentary on the Aristotelian text and consequently taken as Aristotelian.

Jeroen Van Dongen (Utrecht University)

The Genesis of General Relativity and its Influence on Einstein's Unified Field Theory Programme

"The gravitational equations could only be found by trusting […] in the largest imaginable logical simplicity of the natural laws. As it was obvious that the theory of gravity constitutes only a first step in finding the simplest possible general field laws, it seemed to me that this logical route should first be thought through to the end.” As this 1954 statement by Albert Einstein suggests, the discovery of GR was of great influence to his future science, in particular his search for a Unified Field Theory. I will discuss how the discovery of GR provided Einstein with the methodological motivation for his Unified Field Theory programme.

Steven Vanden Broecke (K.U. Brussel)

A Copernican Debate on the Eve of the Galileo Affair: Fromondus vs. the Lansbergii

The importance of material embodiment in early modern astrological practice has been noted before: circulating horoscope collections, textbooks, instruments, ephemerides, tables, played an important part in local redefinitions of astrological practice. To which extent, however, can such appropriations be said to depend on the materiality as such of these artefacts? This paper explores this question by connecting it with the broader issue of astrological practice as one means of engaging with the hidden narrative of a divine providence that operates with material things, and of generating spiritual exercises.

Jeremy Vetter (Dickinson College)

Developing the American West: Agricultural Sciences and the “Land Industry” in the Railroad Era

Environmental knowledge has long been central to the operations of the “land industry”--consisting of railroads, land companies, and other development interests--since the value of land in capitalist societies has been linked to that land’s uses for generating profit. During the railroad era, the agricultural sciences were especially important in the development of the American West, where challenging climatic conditions, especially the lack of water, shadowed the marketing of land. Larger-scale land developers emerged during the nineteenth century, especially the railroads with their vast land grants to sell, leading to the “industrialization” of real estate. The central problem for marketing, selling, and developing vast quantities of land in the American West was to produce credible claims at a distance regarding potentially profitable land uses. At first, the railroads and other large development interests relied mostly upon their own information for publicity campaigns, but over time they came to rely increasingly on knowledge produced by government and academic scientists. By the early twentieth century, railroads and other developers were funding research in agricultural sciences such as agronomy, agrostology, and soil science. This infusion of funding fueled the development of these practical sciences, especially at the state level. It helped open up new areas of inquiry, promoted scientific research in far-flung places that otherwise might have been little studied, and even led to structural tensions between state and federal scientists. It also produced credible environmental knowledge for the classification, rationalization, and exploitation of the land’s environmental resources.

Brant Vogel

The Advent of Graphic Notation in Science

It is generally held that the graphic representation of scientific data is an innovation of the later eighteenth century. However, in the 1680s, the members of the Royal Society of London were treated to a new graphic method of data registration by Dr. Martin Lister, expert on molusks and spiders (amongst other things), demonstrating a new way of recording data from the barometer. From a thin red line drawn upon ruled paper, Lister claimed to be able to reconstruct the meteorological past. He managed to gather a certain amount of enthusiasm in his scientific network, from Robert Plot, at Oxford, who published graphs in the Philosophical Transactions, to William Molyneux in Dublin, to well connected members of the Royal Society. However, the graphic representation of scientific data failed to take on enough allies in this period because of the conceptual investment in verbal and tabular notation of instrumental data. While figures like Robert Hooke built machines that inscribed data in graphic form, even Hooke himself remained in the thrall of the diary and the almanac, which would form the model for the scientific representation of the world to practitioners of the physical sciences for the next century. This paper will examine the anomaly of Lister's seventeenth-century scientific graph within a cultural and scientific milieu that considered it marvelously intriguing, potentially convenient, yet ultimately incomprehensible.

Alexander von Schwerin (University of Braunschweig)

No Mammals for Germany: Biophysics At the Max Planck Society and the Dangers of Civilization

Until the 1960s, the cold war and public concerns about the danger of atomic energy shaped the post-war period. While this is true for both the United States and Germany, there were differences in how radiation was seen to be a problem for the health of human beings. In the United States, a massive amount of money was invested for research since 1946 into the biological dangers of atomic bomb explosions and the dangers of the global fall-out of atomic tests later on. The public and scientific debate about the danger of radiation concentrated on the military threat of potential atomic warfare. In particular, there was great concern about deleterious genetic changes stemming from nuclear explosions. In post-war Germany, the mood of the public debate was self-righteous. The louder physicists protested against nuclear armament, the less they considered their role in the Nazi military atomic program. In contrast, biologists and physicians remained less vocal and continued their research programs into radiation safety—the same investigations they had started in the thirties and during the war.
In my talk I will ask why German research policy dismissed experimental genetics in the fifties while it flourished in the United States In order to answer this question one has to consider the dynamics of the research field of biological radiation both prior to and after 1945. As such, I will describe the research and research policy of three institutes of the former Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the present Max Planck Society: the Institute for Genetics (Nicolai Timoféeff-Ressovsky), the Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics (Hans Nachtsheim), and the Institute for Biophysics (Boris Rajewsky).

Adelheid Voskuhl (Harvard University)

Humans, machines, and Angels: Music-playing Women Automata and Jean Paul’s Theology in the German Enlightenment

Among the dozen or so famed android automata built in the eighteenth century by Swiss, French, and German clockmakers and cabinetmakers, there were two that displayed music-playing women: an organ player built in 1774 and a dulcimer player built in 1784. Contemporary literary and philosophical commentary typically responded to these artifacts in the context of larger pre-occupations surrounding the relationship between the mechanism and the human body and soul. The poet and philosopher Jean Paul, a major representative of the German Late Enlightenment and Early Romanticism, specifically picked piano-playing women automata as an example in a satire that he wrote in 1785 with the title “Humans are machines of the angels”. My paper will integrate an interpretation of this text – and its theological inquiry into the relationship between the (earthly) construction of machine-men and the (divine) creation of humans – with an analysis of the two women automata’s internal clockwork mechanisms. I will bring together the social and economic conditions that allowed the construction of the spectacular artifacts with the intellectual and theological concerns that were the basis of their interpretation. While Jean Paul’s text makes clear that the two women automata replicate common musical body practices of the eighteenth century, the text’s continued references to theological themes are less obvious to understand historically. They require a closer look at the roots of Jean Paul’s thinking in the Wolff-Leibnizian philosophy and theology of the German Early Enlightenment, and at the way that mechanics and theology converged not only in intellectual issues, such as the clockmaker god and the earth-machine, but also in material issues such as the influence of religious sects on the economy of early modern artisan cultures.

Craig Waff (Air Force Research Laboratory)

Clairaut, d’Alembert, and Euler and Their Interactions Regarding the Problem of the Lunar-Apsides Motion

Alexis-Claude Clairaut, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and Leonhard Euler have long been recognized as the primary mathematicians working on problems of celestial mechanics in the mid-eighteenth century. In many cases they worked on the same problems simultaneously, and because a considerable distance separated the first two from the latter, each French mathematician developed a separate correspondence with their Berlin contemporary in order to exchange views on these problems. In particular, the letters they exchanged in the late 1740s and early 1750s allow us to understand better how they endeavored, using Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation (based on an inverse-square law of attraction) and Continental methods of analysis, to explain theoretically the motions of the Moon. Early models of the lunar motions were based on the concept of a movable ellipse, and the initial failure by Clairaut, d’Alembert, and Euler to account theoretically for the observed motion of the lunar apsides caused a brief but intense crisis in the reception of gravitational theory and, not surprisingly, became a lively topic of discussion in their letters. The letters will thus be used to explain how these mathematical astronomers first identified an anomaly within a widely accepted paradigm, to discuss the alternative solutions (modified law, existence of other physical forces, etc.) each conceived to resolve the anomaly and why they were accepted or rejected by contemporaries, and assess how the scientific community ultimately determined what was a generally accepted solution to a temporary crisis in the paradigm.

Andre Wakefield (Pitzer College, Claremont Colleges)

The End of History of Science?

Following John Horgan's lead, I suggest a provocative (if unpleasant) thesis: the history of science has outlived its usefulness as a stand-alone enterprise. Caught between the disregard of practicing scientists and the indifference of historians, the field has no real consistuency. I draw on institutional history, job markets past and present, and a brief if biased history of the profession as evidence. My account is meant more as a challenge than an indictment; I hope it will be taken that way.

Scott Walter (University of Nancy)

The Scandal of Spacetime

The ubiquity in contemporary physics of spacetime and related geometric objects belies the near-universal rejection by physicists of Hermann Minkowski's theory from its inception in November 1907 to mid-1910. In time, of course, spacetime came to be synonymous with the special theory of relativity, the most powerful tool for discovery in relativistic physics, and the most effective means of presenting the new dynamics. How did this change come about? The concept of spacetime itself was initially a scandal for physicists, challenging—and eventually overturning--some of their most cherished views of the nature of physics. By comparing the work of Poincare, Einstein, Minkowski and others, the scandalous aspect of spacetime is brought into sharp focus, and its initial rejection more easily understood.

Alice Walters (St. Francis University)

Piracy in the National Interest: Acquiring and Adapting British Navigational Technologies, 1789-1812

The independence won from Britain by the United States in 1789 radically changed the nature of American navigation. No longer confined to the “coasting” trade, American seamen began to sail around the world in search of new markets. This new global trade demanded the acquisition by American navigators of both the techniques developed in Britain and elsewhere to determine longitude at sea, and the tools necessary to accomplish this task. In this paper, I explore the acquisition of these technologies, and especially the efforts of two navigational authors: the well-known Massachusetts mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, and the lesser-known English ex-patriot mathematician John Garnett of New Jersey.

Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia)

“Social Knowledge and the American State: From the Social Survey to the New Deal”

The fusion of social science and state power represents a dominant theme in the history of the modern American state. The meaning of the “science” in social science, however, has changed markedly throughout the decades, from the qualitative traditions of the early twentieth century to the scientism of the post-World War II period. The combination of social investigation and advocacy as represented in the various social survey movements of the 1900s and 1910s, in which the scientific identification of social facts did not rule out subjectivity and political engagement, persisted well into the New Deal years. This paper will examine the path from the social survey movement, to reformist currents in legal thought in the 1910s and 1920s, to securities regulation within the Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1930s in order to explore the vitality of qualitative forms of social inquiry in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although advocates of scientific rigor strongly criticized New Deal methods, in the political context of the 1930s, the qualitative search for social facts nonetheless allowed the state to “see” new areas of national economic life and provided powerful justification and means for trying to regulate a chaotic, dysfunctional marketplace. In the process of seeing and constructing society, the SEC's regulators also rejected individualist solutions. Instead, they followed the Progressive tradition of emphasizing the social over the individual, and sought to reinforce the power of shareholders as a collective entity.

Zuoyue Wang (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona)

In Sputnik's Shadow: American Scientists, Eisenhower, and the Negotiations over Its Meaning

In the history of American science policy, it is commonly assumed that the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957 led President Eisenhower to establish the presidential science advisory system, with the appointment of a science advisor and the establishment of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). Although factually true, this simple statement masks a more complex story of these pivotal events of Cold War science which revolved around an intense debate over the meaning of the Sputnik crisis by prominent scientists and policy makers. While scientists associated with the national security system, such as Edward Teller, tended to make Sputnik into a military-technological threat, liberal scientists such as I. I. Rabi and others who would dominate PSAC regarded it more as a challenge to American science and education. In this paper I examine the negotiations over Sputnik's implications in the context of ongoing debates over federal support of basic research and over the nuclear arms race within the Eisenhower administration. I will argue that the negotiations over Sputnik’s meaning shaped not only Eisenhower’s response to the crisis and his establishment of the science advisory system, but also the subsequent emergence of both technological enthusiasm and technological skepticism during the Cold War.

Elizabeth Watkins (University of California, San Francisco)

The Medicalization of Male Menopause

The topic of male menopause occupied space on the medical radar screen from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, then virtually disappeared for the next four decades, until the late 1990s. By contrast, articles on this subject appeared in American popular magazines and newspapers at a consistent, if low-level, rate throughout the same period. This paper describes how male menopause became medicalized not by the driving forces of academic researchers and influential clinicians, but instead by a model perpetuated by laypeople and medical popularizers. A medicalized conceptualization of the body and the life cycle had become widespread by the second half of the twentieth century, as Americans grew accustomed to regarding their lives through the lens of medicine. People came to expect medicine to provide a cure for any ailment; in the wake of the development of the so-called wonder drugs, no affliction seemed beyond medical and pharmaceutical intervention. A medicalized model had also been effectively produced for understanding and treating the menopause in women; a parallel, if not identical, stage in the life course of men seemed reasonable. This framework, rather than persuasive evidence from the research laboratory or clinic, helped to medicalize male menopause and provided the basis for its eventual pharmaceuticalization at the end of the twentieth century.

Stephen Weldon (Unviersity of Oklahoma)

Francis Schaeffer and the Understanding of Modern Science in an Evangelical Context

Francis Schaeffer has been recognized as one of the foremost influences on American evangelicalism in the second half of the 20th century. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Schaeffer wrote prolifically and produced two film series. His worldview, shaped by a reading of European and American theology and philosophy, explained what he saw as a crisis in the modern human condition in terms of the misuse of rationality and the development of certain erroneous scientific ideas. His response to evolution, behaviorism, genetic engineering, and the environmental crisis contained elements that would be developed by both evangelical and fundamentalist Christians with different agendas. Despite his influence, Schaeffer’s work has been largely ignored among historians of science interested in modern science-religion relationships. In this paper, I survey Schaeffer’s work, showing how he responded to icons of 20th-century science such as B. F. Skinner and popularizers such as Jacob Bronowski. I compare his attack on the behavioral and biological sciences, his concern with human dignity, and his interest in the environmental crisis with secular counter-culture thinkers such as Jeremy Rifkin and Theodore Roszak. I argue that his stark opposition to certain aspects of science influenced the reception and public understanding of science in this period in both religious and political contexts. I conclude by indicating ways in which Christians have taken some of his concerns in different directions, showing how his popularization of science had a multifaceted appeal.

Alex Wellerstein (Harvard University)

"Old H-bomb arguments never die!": History, Secrecy, and the Teller-Ulam Priority Dispute

The history of the development of the hydrogen bomb has been mired in issues related to priority since the first prototype was detonated at the Enewetak Atoll in 1952. The question of who developed the hydrogen bomb—and how—became an ongoing historical dispute that continues to the present day, tied up with questions of politics, personalities, and the nature of "genius." What was originally a behind-the-scenes debate over whether Robert Oppenheimer could have slowed up the H-bomb's development, and whether Klaus Fuchs could have given any useful information on the H-bomb to the Russians, later spilled into a feud over whether the physicist Edward Teller or the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was the "father" of the weapon. Classification specifically has been blamed for the ambiguity surrounding the origins of the hydrogen bomb, and indeed over time, new revelations about the bomb's origin have emerged as classification restrictions relating to the technical aspects of the weapon were eased. But the process of clarifying has also been muddling: despite increasing knowledge of the so-called Teller-Ulam (or Ulam-Teller) configuration, efforts to resolve the priority dispute unambiguously by scientists (including classification-cleared participants) and historians of science have thus far failed. The ambiguity primarily results, I argue, from the fact that the identity of the actual object of the dispute—the technical configuration itself—is under dispute: as in many priority disputes, the nature of the invention, and what counts as innovation, is itself an area of contention. My paper will be both historical and historiographic, discussing the complicated history of the hydrogen bomb priority dispute, as well as serving as a departure point for an analysis of the effects of government secrecy, the question of nuclear authorship, and an analysis that underscores the failure of the polarizing "openness and secrecy" dialectic as a useful analytic category for the archival historian.

Simone Wenkel (Institute of Genetics, Cologne, Germany)

The Reception of Seminal Molecular Biological Papers from 1945 – 1970. An International Comparison

The development of molecular biology in Germany has been studied with the help of a citation analysis of seminal papers published between 1945 and 1970. The number of citations of these papers and the extent to which the novel research had been taken up at universities and research institutes in Germany are examined and compared with the reception of these papers in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. The study shows significant international differences in the reception of the results obtained in different areas of research. Whereas, for example, bacterial genetics and phage research were less represented in Germany than in France and the United Kingdom, German scientists, mostly chemists were taking up much faster the new results and methods in protein structure research obtained in the United States and the United Kingdom and than their colleagues in France. The results are interpreted on the background of international cooperation, isolation, modes of research funding and national research traditions.

Catherine Westfall (Michigan State University)

Laboratories and Ecosystems: Accelerator Battles as Survival of the Fittest

Since WWII, the U.S. invested heavily in particle accelerators and their host laboratories. But why do some of these large, expensive projects grow and prosper while others wither and die? Thomas Hughes has inspired many of us to see the development of large-scale projects in terms of mechanical systems and networks. Such metaphors have been very useful, for example, in analyzing how funding, components, and experts are gathered and assembled and how scientific knowledge is cobbled together in the process. Peter Galison, Sharon Traweek, and others have conceptualized modern science as a form of tribal behavior; this point of view is especially useful in understanding how projects are shaped by collaboration and competition. For all their power, machine and tribal metaphors are limited because they do not do justice to the intricacies of the relationships that connected those inside and outside the lab; such relationships sometimes develop organically, they defy simple notions of competition and collaboration, and they are both too fluid at a given time and more changeable over time to fit a tribal or a machine mold. Turning away from the preoccupation with high energy physics projects which declined in importance by the 1980s, this talk will use the story of Argonne’s Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (INPS), Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory’s Advanced Light Source, and other federally sponsored materials science projects to show the possibilities of conceptualizing the world of accelerators and laboratories in terms of an ecosystem. In this view by the last decade of the 20th century laboratory life was a matter of survival of the fittest: the fate of projects – and entire laboratories – hinged on struggles that pit scientists within a laboratory, groups of scientists within the laboratory with outside groups, and the laboratory as a whole against other laboratories.

Peter Westwick (University of California Santa Barbara)

The Strategic Offense Initiative? “Space-strike Weapons” and the Soviet Response to SDI

The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is recognized as a central piece in the endgame of the Cold War. Most existing accounts of SDI focus on the American perspective, and also on high political levels. This paper examines the Soviet response and also SDI’s scientific and technological content to provide an important new dimension to the history. The Soviet Union did not like to call SDI by its official name and instead referred to “space-strike weapons.” They coined the term explicitly to describe a new class of space-based, directed-energy weapons, including third-generation nuclear designs, that could instantly strike targets on earth in addition to missiles in flight. SDI technologies, in other words, could directly serve offensive as well as defensive purposes. Soviet negotiating positions consistently reflected their perception of this threat, and some American defense scientists recognized both the potential offensive uses and Soviet fears; and yet this aspect of the Soviet response to SDI was almost completely ignored in contemporary public debates in the U.S. and subsequently in the historical literature. Including this issue in the history of SDI helps bridge the logical gap in the Soviet position, between their obsession with SDI, which even they realized was a diplomatic liability, and their simultaneous belief that they could circumvent a missile shield. This issue also highlights the intersection of science and technology with foreign policy, which both the U.S. and the Soviet Union tried to accommodate at the time.

Paul White (University of Cambridge)

Darwin’s Readers

In cultural and literary studies of science, appropriation is often understood as something that is done by a reader to a text. Approaches which emphasize the multiplicity of meanings and appropriations irrespective of authorial intent or social convention, leave the question of influence open: how does a work affect its readers? Why do some texts make a difference, while others do not? I would like to tackle this question from the other side, as it were. Instead of looking at how readers appropriate texts, I want to examine how texts can appropriate readers. This is particularly evident in the case of Darwin’s works, which were constructed through an elaborate network of correspondence, in which the literal words of others, their scientific standing, their personal character, all contributed to the general currency of his theoretical claims. The study of Darwin’s ‘reception’ from the perspective of his correspondence can help us to think more broadly about the process of appropriation itself: to raise new questions about what was actually being appropriated, and how.

Elizabeth Williams (Oklahoma State University)

Curing Brain or Stomach? Dietetics in Nineteenth-Century French Asylums

Scholarship on the treatment of mental illness in asylums in nineteenth-century France has emphasizesd use of the "moral treatment" developed by Philippe Pinel, widely regarded as the father of French psychiatry. The "moral treatment," which entailed use of persuasion, consoling words, emotional shocks, and related techniques, has evoked interest as an early form of the "psychotherapy" that, by century's end, came to dominate psychiatry. This paper, by contrast, will explore use in French asylums of physical treatments, especially dietetics and other therapies aimed at correcting disordered eating and gastric disburbance. Using examples from both Parisian and provincial asylums, it will trace debates among asylum physicians over the validity of ancient doctrines of the "stomachal" etiology and symptomatology of mental illness and over policies concerning food provision, dietary regimens, and modes of forced-feeding. The paper will conclude that dietary concerns and treatments remained an important part of asylum therapeutics despite widespread acceptance among alienists of theories of the psychogenesis of mental illness and of the superiority of moral treatment over the physical remedies of old.

Aaron Wirth (Brandeis University)

Anti-clerical Physicians In Fin-de-siècle Italy

My paper deals with the attempt of physicians to create a lay ethos on the terrain of the Vatican. Paolo Mantegazza, the senator of eros, not only dabbled in politics, but became the foremost sexologist in the Kingdom of Italy. Enrico Morselli, a player in juridical circles and Italy's leading expert on suicide, went on to popularize Freud much to the dismay of the Holy See. The prominent Bolognese physician Augusto Murri was active in the socialist party. Cesare Lombroso, the founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology, stressed the role of the apparent rather than metaphysical. Luigi Maria Bossi, the only chair of gynecology in the fin de siècle and a deputy to parliament, gave primacy to physiognomy too; he saw in religious fixation the root of somatic deviance in women.

Matthew Wisnioski (Washington University in St. Louis/Virginia Tech)

Scienteers and Enginists: Blaming and Changing in the 1960s

This talk seeks to explain the intersection of the identity politics of scientific and technical work with ambitions for social change in America, circa 1968. It examines two concurrent and interrelated patterns: on the one hand, the collapsing of “engineer” and “scientist” in critical popular and humanist thought in the 1960s; and on the other, attempts of politically engaged scientists and engineers to reify these labels by constructing their identities against each other. At stake was who was responsible for the ill effects of technology, and who had the means to direct their knowledge to constructive social purpose. Beliefs about professional identity shaped how scientists and engineers interpreted the critical theories that informed their intellectual and political horizons. Whether neo-Marxists, communal utopians, or centrist technocrats, these scientists and engineers shared faith in a normative realignment of science and technology that first required defining the dominant culture they hoped to overturn. So much the worse for their colleagues. The paper will pay particular attention to engineer Allen Rosenstein’s congressional campaign to create a National Professions Foundation as a counter-balance to the “irresponsible” National Science Foundation. It will also examine the role identity politics played in organizations such as Science for the People, Experiments in Art and Technology, and the Committee for Social Responsibility in Engineering. The paper concludes that even as they struggled to break down distinctions between artist and technician, citizen and expert, many could not help but reinforce the boundary between scientist and engineer.

Megan Wolf (Columbia University)

Negroes and Paupers Need Not Apply: Life Insurance and the Science of Progress in the Progressive Era

The late nineteenth century ushered in a period of explosive growth for the commercial life insurance industry, a growth that was not merely financial but social as well. The impulse to quantify, classify, and theorize a newly scientific social order asserted itself powerfully, and insurers participated in this movement with specialized skill. By crafting policies and publications to incorporate the “modern” ethos of progress and science, insurers convinced would-be policyholders of their worthiness and social reliability. Such efforts included Frederick L. Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (a tract authored on behalf of the Prudential to “prove” the uninsurability of the African American using scientific and statistical data), but also included social welfare programs such as Metropolitan Life’s visiting nurses, championed by statistician Louis Dublin and social reformer Lillian Wald in 1909. Insurers thus engaged thoroughly with ideologies of social welfare, uplift, and progress. In so doing, they not only participated in but also helped to shape elements of Progressive Era ideology, defining and redefining who was eligible for social support and what their “uplift” could mean.

Yibao Xu (Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York)

A Chinese Perspective of Euclid’s Elements

This year marks the 400th anniversary of publication of the Chinese translation of the first six books of Euclid's Elements by Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi in 1607. As soon as it appeared, the translation stirred dramatic reactions among Chinese mathematicians. The impact of the book on the development of traditional Chinese mathematics over the next two-and-a-half centuries was considerable. Among those Chinese mathematicians who were influenced by the Elements is Mei Wending (1633-1721), perhaps the greatest Chinese mathematician of his day. This presentation will focus on Mei's reading of the Elements by examining the manuscript copy of the Chinese translation of the Elements preserved in the David E. Smith Archives in Columbia University's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Whether this manuscript is the one actually used by Mei himself, and if so, how the marginal annotations in the manuscript may be related to his published works, will also be considered.

Alper Yalcinkaya (University of California, San Diego)

Using Draper to Save the Empire: An Ottoman Appropriation of the “Conflict Thesis”

John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) is generally considered the work that established the foundations of the “conflict thesis” – the view that there exists an unavoidable and irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. In this formulation religion is the biggest obstacle to scientific progress due both to its doctrine and its monopoly on culture. But Draper’s book was not on “religion” per se. Writing in the period in which religion itself was becoming a scientific object, Draper referred to specific religions and their relations with science in a comparative way. Nevertheless, as his principal target was Christianity, and most fundamentally, Catholicism, Draper’s remarks about other religions were not necessarily harsh. The Islamic tradition in particular received considerable praise from Draper. Consequently, his work became a valuable weapon for a most unlikely author: the prolific Ottoman litterateur Ahmed Midhat Efendi (1844-1912). Midhat not only translated Draper’s work into Ottoman Turkish in 1895, but inserted his own commentary into the translation and appropriated Draper’s arguments in order to make a case for Islam. In the hands of Midhat, Draper turned into an advocate of Islam, and science a judge that confirmed the superiority of Islam to Christianity. While his American audience condemned Draper for his positive comments on Islam, Midhat made him into an ally who would help the Muslim author in his crusade against Christian missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. The alliance of Midhat and Draper was the alliance of Islam and science – precisely the recipe Midhat proposed for saving Ottoman subjects from missionary influence, and the Ottoman Empire from disintegration.

Elizabeth Yale (Harvard University)

The Patronage of the Publick: Printing Learned Natural History by Subscription in England, 1690-1710

Beginning at the Restoration, printing by subscription gained traction among learned English authors, particularly authors of natural philosophy and natural history. By financing their work through direct appeal to "the public" and lining up funding in advance of printing, learned authors gained some freedom from booksellers’ insistent emphasis on profit and overcame their resistance to taking on costly natural historical and philosophical projects. In this paper, I explore the relationships between the advertising of natural history through subscription proposals, the creation and manipulation of social networks by booksellers and authors in order to sell books, and the meaning of "the public" in this context, as booksellers' and authors' appeals to subscribers often rested on their books’ supposed public benefit. I focus on Edward Lhwyd, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum from 1691-1709, and his efforts to finance through subscription both his natural history publications and his research travel around the Celtic fringe of Great Britain.

Doogab Yi (Princeton University)

Toward a Regulatory Vision of Development: Models for Animal Chromosomes and David Hogness’s Construction of Drosophila Recombinant DNA Libraries, 1967-1987

The entrance of biochemists and molecular biologists into the biology of development from the mid-1960s marked one of the major shifts in the history of the molecular approach to biology. Coincided with the mass migration of biomedical researchers into the biology of higher organisms, the molecularization of embryos research revealed striking new insights on the genetic and embryonic regulation of organisms’ developmental processes. During this transitional period, Drosophila melanogaster made a stellar comeback as one of the most productive experimental systems for developmental biologists. This paper examines the development of Drosophila genomic analysis by Stanford molecular biologist David Hogness, one of the central figures in the emergence of Drosophila developmental biology. I investigate how he shifted his research focus from the genome of bacteriophage lambda to that of Drosophila in the mid-1960s as a way to reconceive developmental processes in terms of genetic regulation. Indeed, amidst a cascade of proposals for modeling animal chromosomal structures and sequences, Hogness envisioned a set of regulatory mechanisms of development by mobilizing concepts and techniques from bacterial genetics such as the operon model and biochemical mapping. My examination of the genealogy of Hogness’s Drosophila gene mapping project contributes to historical discussions on the emergence of the genetic framework in developmental biology and its subsequent subversion. This paper further illuminates how Hogness’s subsequent adopt of recombinant DNA cloning technology for Drosophila genomic analysis contributed to the emergence of the burgeoning field of evolutionary developmental biology.

Christopher York (Yale University)

“The Arroyos Run with Blood”: Dye Production, Intensification, and Mercantile Monopolies in Colonial Oaxaca

Through most of the Spanish colonial era, cochineal, an intense crimson dye made from Oaxacan cactus beetles cultivated using pre-colonial techniques, was the Crown’s second most lucrative colonial import (after silver). Using geographical surveys for the Crown, Bourbon scientific reports, and Iberian dye manuals, this paper considers how European dyeing technology and the cultural politics of color intersected with local agrarian knowledge in Oaxaca to create a climate favorable to Iberian mercantilism and state-building. I argue that, in a mercantilist economic framework, the illegibility of certain knowledge- and labor-intensive agricultural regimes (e.g. Mexican cochineal) fostered the consolidation of state power by imposing structural limits on the circulation of colonial knowledge and expertise. <i>Grana fina</i> (domesticated cochineal) was physically, linguistically, and agriculturally illegible to its European consumers: neither clearly vegetable or animal in appearance and name and, most importantly, dependent on climactic factors and husbandry practices in which only Oaxacan peasants had proficiency. Such illegibility strengthened the Spanish state’s monopoly by rooting cochineal production in the valley of Oaxaca and complicating the process of repeated naturalization that disseminated other crops like sugar, cotton, tobacco, and coffee through the colonial periphery. Recent critiques have argued that competition in the arena of free trade and reform by state science encouraged growers to rationalize other colonial “plantation crops” using scientific agronomy, slave labor, and extensive land cultivation. Conversely, my paper argues that a mercantile monopoly and a highly-skilled system of peasant production could reinforce each other, with market demand encouraging peasants to further intensify agriculture, while the illegibility of their practices protected the state’s monopoly from theft and conversion to free-trade competition: an unusual symbiosis between smallholding peasant and mercantile empire.

Stephanie Young (University of California, Berkeley)

Managing Military R&D: the Planning Programming Budgeting System in the Department of Defense, 1961-1968 

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara brought young, civilian defense intellectuals, drawn largely from the RAND military think tank, to oversee implementation of major bureaucratic reorganizations at the Defense Department. The “McNamara Revolution” employed systems analysis in an attempt to achieve cost savings and efficiency through modern management techniques. To admirers, McNamara’s reforms were a long overdue attempt to bring rational, scientific management to public administration; to critics the “revolution” was but a politics as usual power grab aimed at centralizing authority for the Secretary at the expense of traditional sources of authority such as Congress and the military services. One of the tools fundamental to McNamara’s reforms was a budgeting innovation developed by head RAND economist Charlie Hitch (soon to be McNamara’s Pentagon comptroller), called the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS). PPBS emphasized budgeting by Departmental objectives, as defined by the Secretary, and sought, through systems analysis to reduce expensive redundancy. As both facilitator and reflection of McNamara’s vision for management through centralized control and quantitative analysis, PPBS made a lot of sense. Yet in one application--managing military research and development--PPBS was an exceptionally non-intuitive method of administration. For at least a decade previously, RAND economists, Hitch included, had worked to develop an economics of innovation that encouraged redundancy of research efforts and a comfort with funding research (especially basic science) not necessarily guided by a clear mission. This was imagined as the way to maximize the efficiency of dollars spent on R&D, yet it depended on logic counter to the management vision of PPBS. This paper will consider the logic and functioning of the R&D program package under McNamara’s management system in the Pentagon. If the sheer size of the postwar R&D defense budget has occupied historians of science for decades, this paper will argue that both processes and outcomes need to be considered together. In short, its not just the “how much” that matters for the allocation of federal money; just as important is the “how.” And for the volatile 1960s PPBS was the “how” of federal budgeting. 

Jeris Yruma (Princeton University)

Lise Meitner, From German Physicist to Jewish Refugee

In the 1920s and ’30s, Lise Meitner was a well-regarded physicist working in Berlin, she headed her own laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and was considered a peer by eminent scientists such as Einstein. In 1938, however, the Jewish Meitner was forced to flee the Nazi regime. Meitner moved to Stockholm where she had found a position at the Nobel Institute, albeit one with a low salary and little institutional support for research. This paper examines how Meitner’s move to a new city and institute in 1938 affected her career. I argue that the move was irreparably damaging in that it harmed both Meitner’s ability to do scientific work and her ability to claim credit for that work, in particular for the discovery of nuclear fission. That the move indelibly marked Meitner as a vulnerable Jewish refugee contributed significantly to the latter. In moving from Berlin to Stockholm Meitner was also forced to confront the increasing scale of physics in the twentieth century – at the KWI her work was done on a lab bench with only a few collaborators, at the Nobel Institute a cyclotron was available but Meitner was largely unable to use it because she lacked the support of an entire institution.

Nasser Zakariya (Harvard University)

NOVA and the Science of History

Scientific theories of our origins are spread widely through Public Television and BBC sponsored accounts. NOVA, the most popular and award-winning science series on public television, demands particular attention as crafting a central vision of human natural history, where increasingly that history entails our cosmic, organic and anthropological past. This paper will analyze the filmic and narratological structure of that history, the popularity and the persistence of certain features common to many of its programs, as well as its educational outreach in marketed interactive media and pedagogic materials. In particular, NOVA series such as <i>Evolution</i> (2001) and <i>Origins</i> (2004) are firmly linked to each other – in production, thematics and filmic vocabulary – as well as linked to the large-scale scientific projects of the Human Genome and NASA Origins Projects. Both the films and the sciences they promote turn together on a narrative structuring of knowledge, where the chapters of material and human existence are now in a position to be chronicled and simulated. The presentation then of contemporary scientific research establishes the present-day heroes of that narrative who in educating the world as to its origins inscribe themselves into the momentous history they author.

Baichun Zhang (Institute for the History of Natural Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Wang Zheng and the Transmission of Western Mechanical Knowledge to China in the 17th Century

Wang Zheng (1571-1644) was born in Jingyang of Shanxi Province. As a child, he learned from his uncle, a Confucian scholar-bureaucrat. Young Wang Zheng was very interested in the ingenious devices in history. When attending the highest imperial examinations, he got to know Jesuit missionaries from Europe , and converted to Catholicism, and had an understanding of Western machines and knowledge. In 1622, he became a successful candidate in the highest imperial examinations, and then was appointed as an official in charge of lawsuit. He not only invented or reconstructed machines, but also improved hydraulic and agricultural technology. On the principle of the European styled clock introduced by Jesuit missionaries, he constructed several kinds of machines. In 1626, he met Johann Terrenz (1576-1630) in Beijing . Terrenz and Wang translated and reconstructed the European mechanical knowledge into Chinese, and, as a result, in 1627 they wrote a new book entitled “Qiqi Tushuo (Illustrations and Descriptions of Extraordinary Machines.” It contained mechanical knowledge that was derived from books written by such scientists or engineers as Simon Steven and Agostino Ramelli. If Wang had any opportunities, he intended to put his construction of devices into practice in order to contribute to the society. As a Confucian scholar, he kept faith with the emperor and his court, committing suicide by starving himself to death when the Ming dynasty came to an end in 1644.

Daqing Zhang (Center for History of Medicine, Peking University)

Reconstructing the Traditional Chinese Medicine by Science—A Historical Study of the Medical Research Society of China

The Medical Research Society of China (MRSC), established in 1935, was an academic organization which aimed at changing traditional medicine by scientific research. However, in the course of studying the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), their critiques of the theory and the philosophical hypotheses of TCM stimulated a vast disputation on whether TCM could be researched in the model of scientific medicine. MRSC and its members not only wanted to find useful drugs from the traditional materia medica, but also to established new medical-care system. In the paper, the author reviews the history of MRSC and its contribution to the development of western medicine in China and points out there have been an intention to combine the traditional medicine with modern medicine in the minds of Chinese physicians since western medicine was introduced into China. The one-way intention is one of the fundamental causes of the disputation on how to deal with two different medical systems in a complex cultural context.

Yuelin Zhu (Harvard University, Monroe C. Gutman Library)

Women’s Liberation Movement and the Women Scientists in the Early 20th century China: The Case of Chien-Shiung Wu

This paper takes Chien-Shiung Wu, the renowned Chinese American physicist, as an example. Wu was born in 1912, the first year of the Republic of China established after a revolution overthrew China’s five-thousand-year monarchical system. Her father was a pioneer in the Women’s Liberation Movement who established the first girls’ school in his hometown, in which her daughter received her early education. Wu was fascinated by the newly introduced and popular modern technology, and made up her mind to be a scientist. When she was enrolled in college as a physics major, her professor, and the dean of the department, was a newly graduated doctoral student of Marie Curie. It was no wonder that Wu took Madam Curie as her model of life. After college, Wu worked in a research institute for two years, and her mentor there was a Chinese woman physicist who had just come back to China with a Ph.D. from the Michigan University. Following her mentor’s advice, Wu came to the U. S. for her graduate study, and remained there due to complicated political reasons. She later became the first woman president of the American Physical Society. Wu was an example, rather than an exception, in her generation of Chinese women intellectuals. By examining her life in the cultural and historical context, a fundamental question can be raised: Is the traditional Chinese culture, as many have presumed, by its nature anti-science and anti-women?

 

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