Pnina  Abir-Am

Brandeis University ( pnina.abiram@verizon.net )

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

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

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

Amy  Ackerberg-Hastings

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

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

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

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

Lloyd  Ackert

Yale University ( lloydackert@sbcglobal.net )

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

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

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

Juliana   Adelman

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

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

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

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

Atsushi Akera

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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

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

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

Nancy  Anderson

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

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

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

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

Karl  Appuhn

New York University ( appuhn@nyu.edu )

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

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

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

Eric H. Ash

Wayne State University ( ericash@wayne.edu )

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

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

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

Renzo  Baldasso

Columbia University ( rb843@columbia.edu )

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

The Intellectual Cultures of Ratdolt's Figures

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

Daniela S. Barberis

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

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

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

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

Nathaniel  Barrett

Boston University ( frostbarrett@yahoo.com )

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

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

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

Richard  Bellon

Michigan State University ( bellonr@msu.edu )

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

Charles Darwin Outflanks His Enemies

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

Keith R Benson

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

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

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

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

Avner  Ben-Zaken

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

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

No Utopia is an Island

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

Carin  Berkowitz

Cornell University ( cab77@cornell.edu )

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

Priority and Methodological Controversy in Early Nineteenth-Century Physiology

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

Sylvia  Berryman

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

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

Mechanics and Philosophical Theory in Antiquity

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

Paola  Bertucci

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

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

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

Richard H. Beyler

Portland State University ( beylerr@pdx.edu )

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

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

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

Ronald A Binzley

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

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

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

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

Patrick J. Boner

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

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

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

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

Francesca   Bordogna

Northwestern University ( f-bordogna@northwestern.edu )

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

Pragmatist Travelers: Mediating the Local and the Cosmopolitan

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

Eric W Boyle

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

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

Rockefeller Philanthropy and the Scientific Solution to Health and Social Problems

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

Michael  Bresalier

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

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

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

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

Paul  Brinkman

University of Minnesota ( brin0142@umn.edu )

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

The Second American Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, 1895-1905

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

Nicholas  Buchanan

Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( nscb@mit.edu )

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

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

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

Glenn Ymballa Cabrera

 ( gcab1804@netzero.com )

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

Japanese Scientific Societies and Their Historical Lessons for the Philippines

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

Joe  Cain

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

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

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

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

Laurie  Carlson

 ( Laucarlson@aol.com )

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

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

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

David  Caruso

Cornell University ( djc52@cornell.edu )

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

The Body Counts:

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

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

Elizabeth Mary Cavicchi

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

( elizabeth_cavicchi@post.harvard.edu )

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

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

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

Hasok  Chang

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

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

The Unbearable Fickleness of the Boiling Point

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

Fabien  Chareix

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

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

Christiaan Huygens and the Probability of Knowledge

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

Alex  Checkovich

University of Virginia ( ajc3f@virginia.edu )

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

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

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

Nuran  Cinlar

Simmons College ( ncinlar@simmons.edu )

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

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

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

Dina Dalouka and co-author Aristotle Tympas

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

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

Electric Power Networks and Interwar Scientific Ontologies:

Competing Orientations in the Early History of Computing (AkeraAl907)

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

Shelley Anne Costa

Independent Scholar ( scosta1@swarthmore.edu )

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

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

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

Kathleen  Crowther-Heyck

University of Oklahoma ( kch@ou.edu )

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

Sacred Philosophy, Secular Theology:

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

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

Serafina  Cuomo

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

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

Contested Definitions of Techne in  Classical Athens._

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

Arthur   Daemmrich

Chemical Heritage Foundation ( arthurd@chemheritage.org )

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

Pharmaceutical Demand Realization

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

Ivano  Dal Prete

University of Verona ( eldalpre@tiscali.it )

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

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

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

Dorien  Daling

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

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

The Creative Role of Scientific Journals:

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

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

Edward (Ted) B Davis

Messiah College ( tdavis@messiah.edu )

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

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

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

Frederick R Davis

Florida State University ( fdavis@fsu.edu )

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

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

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

Sheila Ann Dean

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

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

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

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

William  deJong-Lambert

Columbia University ( WRL4@columbia.edu )

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

Szczepan Pieniazek: Polish Lysenkoist

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

Michael S. Dodson

Indiana University Bloomington ( msdodson@indiana.edu )

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

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

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

Ian  Dowbiggin

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

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

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

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

Eric  Drown

George Washington University ( edrown@gwu.edu )

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

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

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

Sven  Dupré

Ghent University ( Sven.Dupre@UGent.be )

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

A Clever Daedalus to Describe this Thing:

 Visualizing Telescopes, Machines and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Optics

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

Erika  Dyck

McMaster University ( erika.dyck@ualberta.ca )

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

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

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

Otniel  E. Dror

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

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

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

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

Jack  El-Hai

 ( jack@el-hai.com )

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

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

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

Lynne Osman Elkin

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

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

Rosalind Franklin and DNA: 2003 Fame, Justice Pending

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

Erik  Ellis

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

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

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

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

Marwa  Elshakry

Harvard University ( elshakry@fas.harvard.edu )

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

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

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

James  Elwick

York University ( jelwick@yorku.ca )

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

Regarding the Sympathy of Others: Herbert Spencer and Humane Suffering

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

Jim  Endersby

Cambridge University ( jje21@cam.ac.uk )

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

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

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

Paul  Erickson

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

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

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

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

James   Evans

University of Puget Sound ( jcevans@ups.edu )

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

Models and Nature in Ancient Greek Astronomy

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

Kevin  Francis

Evergreen State College ( francisk@evergreen.edu )

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

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

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

Dana A Freiburger

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

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

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

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

Olival  Freire Jr.

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

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

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

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

John  P Friesen

Independent Scholar ( phljpf@hotmail.com )

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

Hutchinsonianism and the Newtonian Enlightenment

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

Michael D. Friesen

University of Colorado ( mikef@mc.net )

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

Sculpture in Service of Science:

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

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

Aileen  Fyfe

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

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

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

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

Jean-Paul   Gaudilliere

 ( gaudilli@vjf.cnrs.fr )

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

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

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

Clayton A. Gearhart

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

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

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

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

Aaron Kenneth Gillette

George Mason University ( ibycusreggio@yahoo.com )

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

Agostino Gemelli and the Latin Eugenics Movement

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

Graeme J.N. Gooday

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

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

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

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

Matthew  Goodrum

Virginia Tech. ( mgoodrum@vt.edu )

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

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

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

Melinda  Brooke Gormley

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

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

The American-Soviet Science Society, 1943-1948

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

Edward   Gray

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

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

The Trials of John Ledyard, Client Traveler

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

Elizabeth   Green Musselman

Southwestern University ( greenmue@southwestern.edu )

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

Folk Classification: How Cultures Categorized Nature in Colonial South Africa

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

Alison  Griffiths

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

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

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

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

Susan Marie Groppi

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

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

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

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

Piers J. Hale

Colby College ( pjhale@interchange.ubc.ca )

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

George Bernard Shaw, Creative Evolution, and Shavian Eugenics

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

Nancy S. Hall

University of Delaware ( nhall@udel.edu )

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

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

Ronald A. Fisher, well known in both statistics and genetics, was emphatically not a believer in parapsychology. He was, however, immensely fascinated by any and all mathematical problems and puzzles. For more than twenty years, Fisher gave informal advice to the Society for Psychical Research, on how to evaluate some of their experiments. Founded in 1882 and headquartered in London, the Society had the continuing problem of deciding if experimental results in telepathy and clairvoyance were meaningful or only due to chance. Fisher focused initially on the mathematics of card guessing, and in the 1920’s he published three papers in the journals of the Society, on how to evaluate and weight the various possible results. He also advised on many ongoing experiments. In one memorable episode involving two hundred respondents and more than 6000 results of card guessing (where the results were already suspect because of the unregulated structure of the experiment), Fisher was able to use the requirement of randomization to demonstrate that the results could not be trusted. Surprisingly, it was the reported results that lacked the expected random quality. (Three years later, the experiment was carried out again, restructured. The Soci