2012 Prize Winners
Sarton Medal: Lorraine Daston
The winner of this year’s Sarton Medal, the History of Science Society’s most prestigious prize for lifetime scholarly achievement, is Lorraine Daston, currently the Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin.
Lorraine Daston describes her path to the field of history of science as circuitous, a result of being unable to choose between the sciences and the humanities. After graduating summa cum laude in History and Science from Harvard, she earned a master’s degree in history and philosophy of science from Cambridge and a Ph.D. in history of science from Harvard. Already a rising star, she won the Schuman Prize from the History of Science Society for a graduate essay on "British Responses to Psycho-physiology." She then spent two years at the Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities before taking up her first professorship at Harvard. Posts at Princeton, Brandeis, Göttingen, and the University of Chicago followed, but no institution has had the good fortune to hold onto Lorraine for nearly as long as the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin. Since 1995 she has led a division of the MPI that is broadly dedicated to "Ideals and Practices of Rationality."
As a Historian she opens our eyes to the profound historicity of scientific ways of knowing. She is, fundamentally, a historian of rationality, keen to understand how human reason has imposed order on natural phenomena and on human behavior in all their multifariousness and unpredictability. She is a philosopher’s historian, a scholar of ideas, taking apart abstract concepts like probability and objectivity and revealing within them the living, breathing ideas in the making. She makes clear that ideas have lives that cannot be explained away as mere effects of the play of interests. Expanding how we think about rationality, she illuminates the moral and affective states that have been judged necessary to scientific practice at different points in history—the sets of values that she has taught us to call science’s “moral economy.” She is our most astute critic of the pretentions of rationalism, but also our most impassioned advocate for the enormous potential of human reason.
Some of her major books include, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988); Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (1998), co-authored with Katharine Park; Objectivity (2007); Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), co-authored with Elizabeth Lunbeck.
Pfizer Prize: Dagmar Schafer
The Pfizer Award Committee is delighted to announce that the 2012 award for an outstanding book in the history of science goes to: The Crafting of 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011. We congratulate its author: Prof. Dagmar Schäfer, Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. And we thank the Pfizer Corporation for its continued support of our Society's major book prize.
The central figure of The Crafting of 10,000 Things is a disgruntled country teacher who lived in South China almost four centuries ago. In his fifties, Scholar Song Yingxing was passed over for promotion. That injustice was, he believed, one more sign of the grave disturbances of his times. Seeking something trustworthy in the world, Scholar Song turned his attention to the remarkable ways that artisans manipulated natural materials and processes to create useful and beautiful things, from rice-fields to luxury porcelains to musical instruments.
Scholar Song's illustrated treatise, The Works of Heaven, published in 1637 has long been recognized as a classic in the history of technology. This work, in conjunction with five other interconnected treatises, aimed at something far more ambitious and unusual: the proper understanding of qi--the fundamental principle of order--that penetrated everything, drove the operations of natural phenomena, and defined the moral structure of the universe.
Prof. Schäfer's description of Song's wonderful woodcut of the silk loom fits her book equally well: "sophisticated, propagating order in its very design, both refined and austere" (p. 139). The metaphor of weaving applies irresistibly to Prof. Schäfer's own exposition, which is as elegant and intricate as the silks that came off the loom. Into the political, social, and economic fabric of the late Ming Dynasty, she deftly interweaves the threads of Scholar Song's unorthodox approach to knowledge, the patterns of one highlighting the assumptions of the other. Through exquisite vignettes of Chinese crafts, their tools, and their material products, she analyses Scholar Song's use of everyday sensory experience (the sound of torn silk!), observation, experiment, and quantification to validate his theories about the manifestations of qi.
Her account of the making of knowledge in Ming society--not to mention the questions she raises about parallels with early modern science on the other side of the world--is stunning. The Crafting of 10,000 Things is a model of what the cultural history of science can
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Karen Reeds, Chair
- Katharine Park
- Norton Wise
Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize: Mark Barrow
The Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize is awarded each year to a book that appeals to general readers. This year’s prize is awarded to Mark V. Barrow, Jr.’s, Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology, published by the University of Chicago Press, 2009. In this sweeping book, Barrow chronicles over two hundred years of the history of the concept of extinction and shows the profound impact it has had in the fields of natural history, the ecological sciences and conservation. Very deeply researched and driven by a compelling narrative, Nature’s Ghosts traces the emergence of a cluster of ideas that only slowly came into focus as, first, a natural fact, then as a radically disruptive concept, and finally as a pressing reality requiring political action. Barrow skillfully weaves science, culture, biography, and the ecology of individual species—dodos, bison, condors, spotted owls—to craft a convincing argument about how the passion for conserving the world’s biodiversity turned “venerable naturalists” into public advocates for the plant and animal kingdoms, even as economic exploitation and nationalist ambition wove in complicated ways through the often conflicting scientific goals of specimen collection and species protection. As Barrows explains, the unapologetic love of naturalists for their subjects of research, and the disheartening rate at which precious species were disappearing, shaped fundamentally the discipline of natural history and contributed to the creation of the field of ecology.
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Maria M. Portuondo, Chair
- Robert Smith
- Laura Walls
Derek Price/Rod Webster Prize: Peter Pesic
Peter Pesic's article, “Hearing the Irrational: Music and the Development of the Modern Concept of Number” hinges on the small subject of the quarter-tone, played beautifully to extract its wider resonances. Pesic's article describes how three mathematicians of the mid-sixteenth century, Michael Stifel, Girolamo Cardano, and Nicola Vicentino, sought to reconcile ancient concepts of number with the new mathematical and philosophical practices of the Italian Renaissance. Pesic argues that each negotiated their philosophical position about the concept of number, and especially the status and nature of irrational numbers, by reference to musical theory and practice. In traditions of enharmonic music, equal divisions of a whole tone were considered musically desirable, perhaps the highest form of beauty, even though mathematically they did not correspond to proportions that could be expressed as rational numbers. Pesic's exposition of the relationship of musical and mathematical controversy is elegant and sure. He portrays the richness of its subject matter so vividly that whole worlds of intellectual passion are opened up. Most importantly, Pesic conveys how debates about geometry and quarter tones might be related to larger concerns in the history of science: the place of beauty in human struggles to understand the natural world, the changing relationship of mathematical philosophy to practical arts of navigation or brick-laying, the question of demonstrations of effect as a basis of knowledge, and the hidden nature of ‘true’ numbers. There is even a mock inquisition in which the style of musical intervals supported by Vicentino was judged as ‘heretical pravity.’ Pesic has written a wonderfully stimulating article, which provokes curiosity and suggestive connections on every page
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Sharrona Pearl, Chair
- Katharine Anderson
-Alan Rocke
Nathan Reingold Prize: Rebecca S. Onion
“Thrills, Chills and Science: Home Laboratories and the Making of the American Boy, 1918-1941” makes a significant contribution to the history of science and education, history of technology, gender studies and American cultural history. Following in the footsteps of Ruth Oldenziel, the author focuses on American toy manufacturers, in this case the A.C. Gilbert Company and the Porter Chemical Company, and investigates how their mass-marketing of chemistry sets to young American boys encouraged technological hobbies, miniaturized “safe” versions of adult activities, social networking via “chemistry clubs,” and a male gender role that privileged brains over brawn. In addition to being solidly grounded in secondary literature from a number of disciplines, this essay probes a wide array of primary sources, ranging from physical objects (the sets themselves and their instruction manuals), oral histories of engineers who grew up with chemistry sets, and newspapers, books and magazines published for young boy readers.
- Richard Kremer, Chair
- Georgina Montgomery
- Alistair Sponsel
Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize: Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis is the 2012 winner of the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize. Professor Smocovitis holds appointments in the Departments of Biology and History at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and is on the faculty of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research.
Dr. Smocovitis has an impressively diverse teaching portfolio that spans many schools and departments at the University of Florida. With feet in both the worlds of science and the humanities, she teaches an enviable range of courses in the Departments of History and Biology (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) on topics in the history of science and medicine, exploration and the environment, evolution, ecology, and ethics. She was instrumental in bringing the UTeach program to UF’s College of Education, and for it, designed a “perspectives” course devoted to the humanistic context of science. Her course is required of math and science majors training to be teachers. In the College of Fine Arts, she is part of an initiative called “Full Circle,” which aims to bring artists and scientists together with undergraduates to nurture creative approaches to problem solving.
Her outreach work has included service as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 2008-2009. With energy and creativity, Dr. Smocovitis has also brought the history of science to senior citizens, alumni groups, garden clubs, museums, parks, and research institutions especially with multi-media, public lectures during the Darwin bicentenary. The titles give a hint at her originality in engaging these diverse audiences without sacrificing intellectual rigor—“Singing His Praises: Darwin and his Theory in Song and Musical Production” and “Flower Power: American Botanists and their Plants at War, 1942-1945.”
Dr. Smocovitis has proven herself to be a skilled educator, a passionate advocate for the history of science in both the academy and general population, and an exemplar of both academic and civic engagement.
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Sara J. Schechner, Chair
- Liba Taub
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Frederick Gregory
Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize: Peter J. Kastor and Conevery B. Valencius
In their article “Sacagawea’s ‘Cold’: Pregnancy and the Written Record of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” Peter J. Kastor and Conevery Bolton Valencius provide a closely contextualized interpretation of the account given in the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition of the illness suffered by Sacagawea in June 1805. The authors show that although Sacagawea’s illness was described by those observing her as a “cold,” in all likelihood she was pregnant and miscarried. They argue that previous scholarly discussions of this event have taken the written evidence at face value and attended little to writing conventions of the period, especially those governing male writing about women’s bodies and reproductive issues. These issues, they argue, are crucial to an understanding of the complexities and “productive ambiguity” in the surviving documents. Focusing on questions of language and style, they place the documents of the expedition in relation to narratives of Western expeditions and travel, discourses of gender and sexuality, and ideas of reproductive health. By closely examining descriptions of Sacagawea’s illness in light of contemporary medical terminology and theory, they offer an innovative analysis of the personal history of a remarkable woman while exploring complicated interactions of print culture, medical knowledge, and social and cultural mores.
This fascinating article earns the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize for its exemplary scholarship and interpretive boldness. Methodologically innovative, it offers a sophisticated integration of the analysis of writing and language with intensive exploration of historical context. Outstanding as medical history, it is researched, argued, and written in such a way as to speak to a larger historical audience on a topic of wide interest. The work of Kastor and Valencius is exceptional in showing how medical history can offer an analytically rich and complex approach to the lives and experience of women and in so doing enrich our understanding of even well known and widely discussed historical moments.
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Elizabeth Williams, Chair
- Marilyn Ogilvie
-Rima Apple