Vol. 40, No.2, April 2011
Printer friendly version of Newsletter
How Science, Policy, Gender, and History Meet each Other Once a Year
Reflections on Our Symposium at the AAAS 2011 Meeting
Quick Links....
The International Year of Chemistry
-------------------------------------
Notes from the Inside
-------------------------------------
News
-------------------------------------
In Memoriam
-------------------------------------
Member News
-------------------------------------
Yanked From the Margins
-------------------------------------
How Science, Policy, Gender, and History Meet each Other Once a Year
-------------------------------------
Donors List Calendar Year 2010
-------------------------------------
Jobs, Conferences, Grants
by Dr. Pnina G. Abir-Am, Resident Scholar, WSRC
Brandeis University, 515 South Street, MS 079, Waltham, MA. 02454
pninaga@brandeis.edu
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting provides historians of science with a unique opportunity for outreach into the scientific community, as well as into the world at large. The Meeting further provides attendees with an entrée into the most recent, even urgent issues of concern on "science and society." In a previous issue of the HSS Newsletter, Bruce Lewenstein of Cornell University, made a special plea for participation of all STS scholars in AAAS Annual Meetings. My experience with the 2011 conference could help others decide how best they could contribute to such a gathering.
I participated as one of three speakers in a symposium co-organized by Alan J. Rocke, a leading historian of European chemistry at Case Western Reserve University and the outgoing Chairman of Section L. (History & Philosophy of Science), and Penny J. Gilmer, a chemist at Florida State University, leader of the NSF-Advance consortium of five Florida institutions, and co-editor of an upcoming volume on the significance of Mme Curie’s Centennial for science education. She also provided co-sponsorship of the proposed Symposium by AAAS’s Section C (Chemistry).
Our Symposium, "Celebrating the Centennial of Mme Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry" greatly benefited from this collaboration between an historian of science and a scientist, most notably in securing an optimal range of complementary speakers: a scientist, a general historian, and a historian of science. Moreover, the panelists covered key themes, including the experimental and theoretical aspects of Mme Curie’s discoveries; her reception as a woman scientist in America in the 1920s; and the changing patterns of her commemorations throughout the 20th Century. The first speaker, Patricia (Trish) Baisden, a nuclear chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, discussed Mme Curie’s experimental procedures in discovering radioactivity, polonium, and radium with detailed graphics of the laborious distillation processes. She also displayed many original photos given to her by a former director of the Radium Institute in Paris, while asking intriguing questions such as whether Mme Curie had a sufficient experimental basis to claim the discovery of polonium when she did. (Yes, she did! even by current standards) Trish further enlightened us on subtle distinctions between nuclear chemists such as herself and radiochemists, both "descendents" of Mme Curie’s discoveries: one branch is more physical and the other more chemical, as befits the progeny of the inter-disciplinary discovery of radioactivity.
The second speaker, historian Julie Des Jardins of Baruch College/ CUNY-NYC, spoke on the long-lasting American fascination with Mme Curie, ever since her visits to the US to collect donated radium in 1921 and 1929. She emphasized how Mme Curie’s public image as a woman scientist was adjusted to fit gender stereotypes, such as the claim that her science was "maternal" or that she practiced it primarily for the sake of curing cancer. The impact of such a distorted public image on generations of women scientists is further elaborated in her recent book, The Madame Curie Complex, The Hidden History of Women in Science, which builds upon scholarship on women in science in America by many HSS members, most notably Margaret W. Rossiter, as well as women scientists, most notably Caroline Herzenberg and Ruth Howe.
My talk, the third and last, discussed the concept of commemorative practices in science*, the stimulus they provide for conducting new research in history of science, and potential ramifications for science policy. I began with analyzing new data I have recently collected on Mme Curie’s commemorations throughout the 20th century, while pointing toward a pattern of increasing globalization. Earlier anniversaries were marked primarily in France and Poland, (her adopted and native countries) culminating with the Curies’ reburial in the mid-1990s in the Pantheon, the graveyard of great French minds, (or as Mona Ozouf put it, "L’Ecole Normale des Morts") in a state-sponsored major event. This symbolic act made Mme Curie the first woman to be so honored for her own scientific accomplishments.
* - As in Commemorative Practices in Science, (University of Chicago Press, 2000) which includes a dozen historians of science, many from the US, and twice that number of case studies, edited by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Clark A. Elliott; and La Mise en Memoire de la Science (Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1998) edited by Pnina G. Abir-Am, which includes a majority of French case studies and authors. Contrary to persistent rumors, one book is not a translation of the other: 3 out of 12 authors appear in both books but each wrote a different paper for the two volumes.
By contrast, in the post-Cold War era, the centennial of the discovery of radioactivity in 1998 became global with major anniversaries being held not only in France and Poland but also in the US and Japan. The latter, perhaps for reasons related to the trauma of the atomic bomb, i.e. some form of applied research in radioactivity, marked the 1998 centennial over a year long program, in half a dozen Japanese cities*, including the participation of many scientific societies, representing the medical, physical, and chemical sciences.
* - Some of those locations became associated with the tsunami of March 2011, most notably Sendai and Yokohama, though many commemorative events were held in Tokyo.
Second, I showcased the work of several historians of science whose research helped dispel the gender stereotypes long shrouding Mme Curie’s public memory, especially in America. They included: (in alphabetical order) Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent of the University of Paris who clarified the emergence of Mme Curie’s scientific dynasty with elder daughter Irene and son-in-law Frederic, both using the surname Joliot-Curie, becoming Nobel co-laureates for the discovery of artificial radioactivity in 1934, the year of Mme Curie’s death. I also mentioned Soraya Boudia of the University of Strasbourg, who clarified Mme Curie’s intense preoccupation with metrology as well as her role as lab director who trained a contingent of women scientists; J.L. Davis of University of Kent, UK who established Mme Curie’s role as leader of a research school including a diverse mix of both French and foreign, women and men scientists; Helena M. Pycior, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who clarified Mme Curie’s status as the primary investigator in her collaboration with husband Pierre Curie; and Xavier Roque of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who established that Mme Curie’s extensive collaboration with the radium industry was a central part of her identity as a scientist. For reasons of time, I could not dwell on many biographical studies of Mme Curie, works which are already better known since they cater to a wide public. But I did flash a slide from a 1996 French film in which Mme Curie was played by Isabelle Adjani. Since Trish had previously shown Mme Curie’s portrayal by Greer Garson in the 1943 American film based on the first biography of Mme Curie, (by younger daughter Eve) the audience could thus compare Mme Curie’s imagery on film half a century apart.
Third, I drew attention to the pertinence of Mme Curie’s work, life, and career for public debates in our own time on the under-representation of women in science, while offering half a dozen or so "lessons." Included among these lessons were: emigration as a condition for pursuing science by wo/men from peripheral countries; diversifying one’s collaborative strategies with other scientists, including one’s own spouse, so as to preserve one’s "scientific credit" especially when one is a junior scientist, a woman, or a member of some other disadvantaged group; cooperation with industry as a source of financial independence; and coping with the international flow of research associates, including women, in periods of great social change such as the aftermath of WWI.
Last but not least, I drew attention to Mme Curie’s life as a case study in resourceful balancing of an intense and demanding career with child rearing, again with the help of a highly emotive visual device: a photo of Mme Curie and her children in 1906. I thus emphasized that her daughters were born both before and after the discovery of radioactivity in 1898, (i.e. Irene in 1897 and Eve in 1904) possibly in order to help a century later, when a public debate on the balancing of career and family life by women in science is still raging. The photo thus conveyed that having children does not preclude discoveries and vice versa, that is, discoveries do not preclude women scientists having children. I also asked whether a better familiarity with Mme Curie’s life by leading figures in public debates regarding the under-representation of women in science could have spared us a year-long spectacle of historically uninformed "hypotheses" being floated as reasons for this under-representation. (The three reasons floated by L Summers in this order were: 1) women’s lack of interest to work long hours; 2) women’s innate lesser aptitude for science; 3) gender discrimination. The latter was however not only listed as the last and least factor but further described as deriving from socialization, thus implying a normative condition which need not be changed. The debate which became known as the debate that "won’t go away" (New York Times, 5-12-05) is resurfacing periodically, most recently in the Chronicle of Science Education, and PNAS, both articles on 2-7-11. For details see my "Gender and Technoscience: A Historical Perspective", Journal of Technology Management and Innovation, 5 (1) 2010, 152-165, also at www.jotmi.org) which also discusses the wider historical context of that debate.)
The session, which unfolded without glitches, (except for failing to get the Skype connection so as to enable co-organizer Penny J. Gilmer, then still recovering from a car accident, to watch us from afar) was attended almost to capacity (~160). Possibly this was so because it was scheduled in a great time slot, the first full day of the 5-day conference, at 10 a.m. and in an accessible auditorium on the first floor of the Washington Convention Center. The Nobel allusion in its title may have been responsible for the fair number of men in the audience, since they rarely attend "women’s topics."
Still, my experience with our Symposium went beyond the opportunity it had given me to justify the organizers’ confidence in my ability to contribute to their program. Two unexpected revelations were equally important. The first had to do with the realization that by offering a unique opportunity to engage with a wider public, the AAAS had reactivated my dormant jocular tendencies. Though I did not specifically prepare anything funny, the lively response to my humoristic presentation style persuaded me that I should engage in such public talks more often. This is a useful lesson, coming as it does not too long before the release of a sure to be controversial book.
The second revelation was my grasping of a connection between my topic (how the Curie centennial had been historically observed) and the opportunity to engage in activism by sharing a petition calling upon scientific organizations to practice gender inclusiveness in seeking contributors for ongoing Centennials of Mme Curie’s Nobel in Chemistry, the rationale for UNESCO’s declaration of 2011 as the International Year of Chemistry. Our Symposium may have been rare in having an adequate, perhaps even more than adequate, representation of women speakers and organizers. Organizations other than AAAS appear to have a surprisingly low presence of women scientists and scholars in programs which purport to honor Mme Curie. [For a copy of the petition, please contact the author.]
To conclude, the AAAS Symposium in which I agreed to participate despite some initial ambivalence due to the time and effort that such large-scale meetings demand, turned out to be an amazing experience. Our Symposium not only enabled me to combine scholarship and activism in a way I value as being more professional than being an Ivory tower recluse, or alternately serving the public "only." These two are Janus-faced endeavors, and we should not shy away from stepping up to the plate when a rare opportunity arises to combine scholarship with activism for a great cause. Moreover, meeting soul mates among those who came to the podium to express interest in the talk, the petition, or both, further inviting me to speak in their institutions, was absolutely divine.
Regretfully, I must cut this short even though the AAAS Annual Meeting included a host of other "attractions" well beyond our Symposium. In particular, I hope to keep you informed on how the Mme Curie Centennial is unfolding with regard to scientific and historical organizations becoming more aware of the need to include more women scientists and scholars in their programs.