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Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2012
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HSS Members at AAAS: The HSS congratulates the following members for their election as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, from Section L (History and Philosophy of Science).

Steven J. Dick (Retired, NASA): "For distinguished contributions to the history of astronomy and space science, and his leadership at the U.S. Naval Observatory and director of the NASA History Office."
W. Patrick McCray (University of California, Santa Barbara): "For distinguished contributions to scholarship and education in history of science, technology and instrumentation, particularly of intellectual and social interactions in recent astronomy and physics."
Carolyn Merchant (University of California, Berkeley): "For distinguished contributions to the field of history and philosophy of science, particularly for the history of the scientific revolution and gender and science."
Helga Nowotny (European Research Council): "For outstanding leadership in promoting international excellence in and understanding of science, policy, and education, most recently in courageous leadership of the European Research Council."
Rosemary Stevens (Cornell University): "For original work at the trans-disciplinary boundaries of public health, policy, and historical understanding of their social development, and for exceptional service to the professions."

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Wilbur Applebaum's (Illinois Institute of Technology) translation of Jeremiah Horrocks's observation of the transit of Venus, Venus Seen on the Sun: The First Observation of a Transit of Venus by Jeremiah Horrocks, has just been published by Brill. The translation is accompanied by commentary.

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Julie K. Brown (Independent Scholar) has a chapter entitled "Making 'Social Facts' Visible in the Early Progressive Era: The Harvard Social Museum and Its Counterparts" in the new publication Instituting Reform: The Social Museum of Harvard University, 1903–1931, edited by Deborah Martin Kao and Michelle Lamunière, The collection is available from Yale University Press.

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D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University) has published a new book, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century, available from University of Chicago Press.

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Alex Csiszar has joined Harvard University's Department of the History of Science as an assistant professor (tenure track). He specializes in print histories.

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Helen Curry (Yale University), who will receive her doctorate this spring, has been appointed University Lecturer in the History of Modern Science and Technology, in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.

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Joseph Dauben (City University of New York) was recently awarded the Whitman Prize honoring scholarship in the history of mathematics by the American Mathematical Society at the AMS 2012 annual meeting in Boston. He was recognized for his contributions to the history of Western and Chinese mathematics, and for deepening and broadening the international mathematical community's awareness and understanding of its history and culture.

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William deJong-Lambert (Columbia University) received a Science, Technology and Society grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the Second International Workshop on Lysenkoism, which will be held at the University of Vienna, 21–23 June 2012. He offers special thanks to Mitchell Ash and Carola Sachse at the University of Vienna for hosting the workshop.

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Dawn Digrius (Stevens Institute of Technology) spoke at United Nations Headquarters on 5 March 2012, in a Side Event at the UN 56th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW-56). The panel, "Rural Women Think Green and Act Green," was sponsored by the Mission of Sri Lanka and the International Health Awareness Network. Dirigius' talk was entitled "Senora Santa's Challenge: Sustainability and Rural Women in Coastal Lowland Ecuador." Her project examines the history of agricultural production and water management along the coast of Ecuador and how technology, policy, and ethics played a role in how successful mechanisms for sustainability were implemented in the period between 1958 and 1998.

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Krishna Dronamraju (Foundation for Genetic Research) is co-editor of a new book, Victor McKusick and the History of Medical Genetics, (Springer) with Clair A. Francomano. Victor McKusick is widely known as the 'Founding Father of Medical Genetics.' His seminal contributions to medical genetics led to the establishment of a distinct discipline. As a clinician, teacher, scientist, historian and author, McKusick's role is unparalleled. He was a founding member and the first President of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), and performed an outstanding service by bringing genetics into the mainstream of medicine.

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Steffen Ducheyne was appointed Research Professor at the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) for 2011–12 and has just published 'The main Business of natural Philosophy': Isaac Newton's Natural-Philosophical Methodology, in the Springer series Archimedes.

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Johnathon Erlen (University of Pittsburgh) has been honored with a lecture series named for him by the C. F. Reynolds Medical History Society—the nation's largest regional history of medicine society. The Jonathon Erlen History of Medicine Lecture will be held each year in February.

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Aileen Fyfe has a new book, Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–60 (Chicago). A review in Nature said that "this chronicle of great endeavour is studded with small pleasures, from the horror over 'sordid' railway literature to engineer Charles Babbage's awe of printing speeds at The Times."

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Loren Graham's (MIT, Emeritus) book (co-authored with Jean-Michel Kantor) Naming Infinity was honored at the 2011 Moscow Non-Fiction Book Fair as one of the ten best books published in the Russian language in 2011. The book was also the major reason that the presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences reversed its earlier resolution in which it censured, for ideological reasons, the great Russian mathematician Nikolai Luzin, the major figure in the book. Luzin has been restored to full honor as founder of the Moscow School of Mathematics. Graham and Kantor were invited to Russia for a book tour during which they gave 18 lectures on the book in three cities.

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Victoria A. Harden (Independent Scholar) has released a new book, AIDS at 30: A History, available from Potomac Books.

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Robert Hicks (Mütter Museum/College of Physicians of Philadelphia) has just published Voyage to Jamestown: Practical Navigation in the Age of Discovery, with the U.S. Naval Institute Press.

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After twenty-five years, Frank James at the Royal Institution in London has, with the publication earlier this year of the sixth and final volume, completed editing the Correspondence of Michael Faraday. In total the volumes contain 5053 letters, of which just over 73% were previously unpublished. Among the major reassessments of Faraday's life and work brought about by the publication of all his extant letters was the crucial role that he played in the English and colonial lighthouse service. After 1836, 17% of his letters deal with lighthouse matters including the attempt (ultimately a failure) to electrify lighthouses in the late 1850s and early 1860s.

Photo: Frank James with two volumes of the Correspondence of Michael Faraday, now complete

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David Jones (Harvard University) has been appointed as the first Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine in the Department of the History of Science. He will be teaching the history of modern medicine and will be initiating—in cooperation with Harvard Medical School—a new program in the cultural and social aspects of medical practice.

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Professor Abdul Nasser Kaadan (Aleppo University, Syria) was nominated by Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Sciences of India to the Nobel Prize in literature (historical studies). Professor Kaadan studies the contributions of Muslim physicians to "Western" medicine. He is the founder and now the president of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine (www.ishim.net), and the chief editor of its journal, which is published in English. Also, he is the director of the editorial board of the Prominent Arab Physicians Encyclopedia (www.papencyclopedia.net).

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Adrienne Kolb, Fermilab Historian and Archivist, recently received a grant from the American Institute of Physics for the Fermilab Archives to process and prepare an online finding aid for the collection of mid-20th century physicist, John D. Linsley. In 1963, at Volcano Ranch, NM, Linsley detected what were then the highest energy cosmic rays observed on earth. Chicago Archivist Valerie Higgins has joined Fermilab to organize and complete this project, which will be shared with the AIP's Niels Bohr Library & Archives and the Center for the History of Physics.

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Henk Kubbinga (University of Groningen) has edited the first two volumes of The Collected Papers of Frits Zernike (1888-1966), now available from Groningen University Press. These two volumes feature Zernike's original publications, mostly in French, German and Dutch. An English translation of these papers is in progress, and a planned fifth volume will offer additional biographical and historical analysis of this Nobel Prize winner. Once finished, the Collected Papers of Frits Zernike will provide a panoramic view of developments in physics, especially optics, between 1910 and 1960.

Photo: Portrait of Fritz Zernike, commissioned for the Collected Papers, by Dutch artist Eric Bos.

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Mark Largent (Michigan State University) is the new Secretary for Section L of the AAAS. The AAAS thanks Jonathan Coopersmith (Texas A&M) for his many years of service as Section L Secretary.

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Bruce Lewenstein (Cornell University) is spending the first half of 2012 as the first Presidential Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. He is working on public-engagement issues, helping CHF identify relevant opportunities and assessment tools for engaging the public in history of science.

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Paul Lucier (Independent Scholar) was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for his project "Exploration and Industry: Science and the History of Mining in the American West."

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Chandra Mukerji (University of California San Diego) is co-recipient of this year's Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association for her book, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi.

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Sally Newcomb has won the Geological Society of America's Mary C. Rabbitt History and Philosophy of Geology Award for 2011 for her The World in a Crucible: Laboratory Practice and Geological Theory at the Beginning of Geology, GSA Special Paper 449.

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Donald Opitz (DePaul University) has co-edited For Better or for Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences with Annette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen. The volume is part of Springer's Science Networks. Historical Studies series.

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David Orenstein will be retiring as of 30 June 2012 after teaching mathematics for over a quarter of a century at an inner-city Toronto high school. He looks forward to more time and travel to pursue his research into the history of Canadian science, especially mathematics and astronomy.

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Joanna Radin, who is completing her doctorate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has been appointed Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine in the Section for the History of Medicine in the Yale Medical School and will join the faculty of the University's Program in the History of Science and Medicine.

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Sophia Roosth has joined Harvard University's Department of the History of Science as an assistant professor (tenure track). She specializes in the ethnography of scientific practice.

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Carola Sachse and Silke Fengler (University of Vienna, Austria) have co-edited a volume in German on the history of Austrian Nuclear Research (1900-1978). The volume, Kernforschung in Österreich: Wandlungen eines interdisziplinären Forschungsfeldes, 1900-1978, was published in January 2012 with the Boehlau Publishing House, Vienna.

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Many HSS members and recent Isis authors contributed to a new volume, edited by members Mark Solovey (University of Toronto) and Hamilton Cravens (Iowa State University, Emeritus), entitled Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, available from Palgrave Macmillan. Contributing members and friends of the HSS include: Howard Brick, Michael Bycroft, David Engerman, Hunter Heyck, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Joel Isaac, Janet Martin-Nielsen, Theodore Porter, Joy Rohde, Kaya Tolon, Marga Vicedo, and Nadine Weidman.

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Leslie Tomory (McGill University) has a new book, Progressive Enlightenment: The Origins of the Gaslight Industry, 1780-1820, available now from MIT Press.

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Elizabeth Watkins has been named Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, San Francisco. Her new book, Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America (co-edited with Jeremy Greene) will be published in April 2012 by Johns Hopkins University Press.

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