Guggenheim Fellowships
In the July 2008 Newsletter, we offered profiles of Ken Alder and Michael Bess, two of the seven 2008 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellows whose projects are connected to the history of science. The remaining winners will be profiled in the upcoming issues.
Alice Dreger is Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics in the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University in Chicago. Dreger is working on a book project on science and identity politics in the Internet age.
I wrote my dissertation in History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University on the scientific and clinical treatment of people labeled hermaphrodites in France and Britain, focusing on 1868-1915. When I started publishing that work in 1995, people who had been born with sex anomalies began asking me to help change the contemporary medical treatment system, a system they felt had harmed them. Listening to their stories, I learned that the medical system was suffering from a 1950s hangover; it featured sexist and heterosexist reasoning, lacked an evidentiary basis, and sometimes even included active deception of patients regarding their own medical histories.
I ended up spending the next decade working on intersex advocacy, helping to lead the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) and the intersex rights movement. Through my scholarship, but also through a lot of international media and Internet work, i.e., through a lot of politicking, I helped force a shift in patterns of care. We also changed the public understanding of intersex, from a hidden medical shame to a relatively common variation and identity. I never thought, when I was writing my dissertation, I’d end up on Oprah, but Oprah is part of what it takes to move a culture on an issue like intersex.
In early 2006, a colleague introduced me to J. Michael Bailey, a sex researcher at Northwestern University (where I was then a visiting professor). Bailey, I knew, had been involved in an extremely ugly controversy over a book in which he argued for an unpopular view of male-to-female transsexualism, one that claimed it is not primarily about gender identity, but about erotic orientation. Some of the people I had met through my intersex work had been strong critics of Bailey. Yet, in person, Bailey did not match the very negative reputation he had in queer activist circles. Intrigued, I started to look into the Bailey book controversy, and ultimately decided to write a history of it. That book-length history was published as a target article in Archives of Sexual Behavior along with 23 commentaries and my response to the commentaries.
In doing my research, I was shocked to find that a small number of Bailey’s critics had made very serious charges against him that were essentially groundless. They had come close to ruining Bailey’s reputation and career because they didn’t like him popularizing a theory about them that they despised. After my findings were covered in the New York Times, Bailey’s critics started to come after me in the same way they had against him. One – a highly distinguished professor named Deirdre McCloskey – even claimed Bailey paid me to do the work.
The conglomeration of these experiences has made me fascinated in what happens when identity politicians and researchers clash. I am sympathetic to both sides, having lived in some ways on both sides. So the book I’m working on now, under the auspices of my Guggenheim Fellowship, considers the Bailey book controversy (including attacks on my work on it), the intersex rights movement, and a number of other instances of identity-politics-meeting-research, to explore questions of what does, could, and should happen in such instances.
Susan S. Silbey is the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
My plan is to work on a book, Governing Green Laboratories: Trust and Surveillance in the Cultures of Science, describing the introduction of environmental, health and safety management systems into research laboratories. This is an effort to explore a confrontation between the authority of law and the authority of science, and to do so in the very heart of science: in the laboratory.
In many ways, scientific spaces are no different than most others, equally saturated with health and safety regulations, employment and financial regulations, susceptible to claims of loss and liability. Yet, I am discovering through my research that for scientists, who are authorized and insulated by layers of education and expertise, the law that is there has been, until recent years, largely unnoticed and inconsequential, not at all the colonizing, contradictory institution described by most citizens. I began to wonder: how do scientists respond to recently passed laws and regulations that disrupt their usual practice by requiring them to change laboratory routines, complete new training and yearly retraining, and submit to periodic surveillance of laboratory practices in the name of environment, health and safety? And, what would this tell us about the universal aspirations of the rule of law?
Using data from five years of participant observation in five science departments of a major American university, I describe how laboratories are places of danger as well as discovery. Ultimately, laboratories are dangerous places because the consequences of scientific inventions are insufficiently understood and often misused. These long-term risks may be the most significant scientific menace, but are not the immediate focus of the book. Laboratories are also immediately hazardous places because routine laboratory procedures employ substances and technologies that are threats to life and the environment, substances such as biological agents and toxins, flammable and noxious chemicals, radioisotopes and technologies such as lasers, giant magnets, and high energy pulses.
There is, however, another kind of persistent laboratory hazard that derives not simply from the materials and machines with which scientists work, or the amalgams and technologies they make whose properties are not entirely understood. This danger, which is the major focus of the book, is embedded in the distributed labor that supports and enacts the work of the laboratory, work that is spread across dozens of persons and coordinated through invisible links that constitute the research university as a professional bureaucracy. By substituting systems of audit and surveillance for the relations of trust and collegiality that have built and sustained modern science, contemporary environmental health and safety management systems seek to reconstruct the everyday routines and rituals of scientific practice, remaking them into the elements of a new form of sociality. While surveillance and audit are familiar in business and government, these are foreign to the world of science and the professional lives of scientists where traditions of autonomy, individual responsibility, and trust have been so powerful in creating the authority of science.
Nonetheless, as science contributes its knowledge to the institutionalization of safety regimes, it subordinates itself to the knowledge and principles – the laws – it helps to establish. In this way, the commonplace expectation for a universal rule of law is reproduced in the uncommon world of laboratory science.
Ruth Lewin Sime is Professor Emerita, Department of Chemistry, at Sacramento City College. Her new project is titled “History and Memory: A Biographical Study of Otto Hahn during National Socialism and the Postwar Period.”
It has often been said that in Germany after World War II, people in all walks of life engaged in the collective silencing of the past. That was certainly true for the scientific community and its most prominent spokesperson, Otto Hahn (1879-1968), who served as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and its successor organization, the Max Planck Society, from 1946 to 1960. Famed for the discovery of nuclear fission and known for his aversion to Nazism, Hahn used his reputation and his position to create an image of German science as undiminished in excellence, untouched by National Socialism, and uninvolved with the war. Although that image was not historically accurate or even particularly credible, it resonated with the expectations and self-portrayals of the great majority of scientists and of Germans overall. Hahn’s silencing and myth-making made him a hugely admired public figure who was revered by a generation of scientists and is remembered as a cultural icon to this day.
With this study, I intend to document Hahn’s advocacy in the postwar period, to examine his many memoirs and reminiscences, and to retrieve what I can of his own hidden history. It is a matter of record, for example, that Hahn was appalled by the racial policies of the Hitler regime and tried to help several of his Jewish colleagues, but later, in his published memoirs, he barely mentioned these experiences and he was completely silent about the persecution he had witnessed. Similarly, with respect to his wartime work Hahn always portrayed himself as a modest laboratory scientist whose research was “pure” and always openly published, whereas in fact he and his institute had been committed to Germany’s nuclear fission project, a secret military-supported research program that brought Hahn into the most privileged scientific structures of the National Socialist state. The disconnects are many, and they are especially apparent in Hahn’s conduct in the early postwar years, when he distanced himself from his émigré friends, wrote glowing testimonials for associates whose politics he once despised, defended industrial magnates on trial for war crimes, and made every effort to create and propagate a sanitized collective history of the scientific enterprise during the Third Reich. One wonders who this man actually was; for me, the question remains open.
In terms of biography, my picture of Otto Hahn remains fragmented and far from coherent. Historically, however, I hope this study will be valuable for uncovering “missing” history, for documenting a collective effort to silence and rewrite the past, and for raising questions about the politicization of science and the nature of ethical responsibility.