Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2012
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Notes from the Inside
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News from the Profession
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Search for a New Society Editor
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Upcoming Conferences
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Job and Fellowship Announcements
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Member News
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From the HSS President: History of Science Unbound
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Learning Another Language
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Pox and the City
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Tennis and the Scientific Revolution
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New San Francisco Foundation Is Telling the Story of Biotechnology
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Reflections from Cleveland and the 2011 Annual Meeting
Mark V. Barrow, Jr. (Virginia Tech) has been selected as the winner of the 2011 Susan Elizabeth Abrams Prize, which is awarded biennially for the best book in the history of science published by the University of Chicago Press.
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Peter Byrne published The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family with Oxford University Press in 2010. In 2012, Princeton University Press will publish The Everett Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Collected Works 1956-1980 With Commentary, edited by Jeffrey A. Barrett (UC Irvine) and Peter Byrne.
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Jamie Cohen-Cole (Harvard University) was awarded the 2011 Forum for the History of Human Sciences Article Prize for "The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society," which appeared in Isis Vol. 100, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 219-262.
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Jim Fleming's (Colby College) book, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia University Press), recently received best-book prizes in two separate disciplines: SHOT's 2011 Sally Hacker Prize and the American Meteorological Society's Louis J. Battan Author's Award. Both prizes honor books reaching a large readership.
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Ed Gosselin has published The Reformation with HarperCollins, available in print and Kindle editions. He is currently working on another book on the history of science from the Babylonians to Galileo.
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Gabriel Henderson, a PhD candidate at Michigan State University, received the 2011–2012 American Geophysical Union History of Science Fellowship to conduct research on the Papers of Helmut Landsberg at the University of Maryland Hornbake Library and corresponding collections at the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council.
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Sally Smith Hughes's (University of California, Berkeley) book Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech, was published in October 2011 with the University of Chicago Press.
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Claire Jones has been appointed Director of the new Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Leeds.
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Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (University of Minnesota) received the Ada Comstock Distinguished Women Scholar Award from the University of Minnesota Women's Center, for which she delivered the Ada Comstock Distinguished Women Scholars Lecture, "Uncovering the Past, Charting the Future: The Rise of Women in Science," on 12 October 2011.
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John Krige's (Georgia Tech) essay, "The Proliferation Risks of Gas Centrifuge Enrichment at the Dawn of the NPT: New Light on the Negotiating History," has won the prestigious Doreen and Jim McElvany 2011 Nonproliferation Challenge essay competition. Sponsored by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), the McElvany Nonproliferation Challenge is an annual international essay competition now in its fourth year. The competition is designed to encourage innovative scholarship in the nonproliferation field.
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Pamela O. Long has published Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, part of the Oregon State University Press Horning Visiting Scholars Publication Series, edited by Anita Guerrini and David S. Luft. Artisan/Practitioners offers an introduction to the history of science through a new discussion of the "Zilsel thesis," which argues that artisans, craftsmen, and other practitioners exerted an important influence on the development of empirical methodologies in the Scientific Revolution, the "new sciences" of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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Craig Martin's (Oakland University) Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes was published fall 2011 with Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Agustí Nieto Galan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) has published Los públicos de la ciencia: expertos y profanos a través de la historia with Marcial Pons Press in Madrid. An abstract, along with ordering information, may be found at the publisher's website.
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Heather Munro Prescott (Central Connecticut State University) has published The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States, available through Rutgers University Press.
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Robert Proctor's (Stanford University) Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition has been published by the University of California Press.
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Norma Rosado-Blake has joined the AAAS as the new Archivist and Records Manager. Previously, she worked as the Archivist of the American Kennel Club and volunteered at the National Archives and Record Administration, where she indexed Native American Veteran's Pension records. She started at the AAAS on 21 September 2011.
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Alexandra Rutherford (York University) has just published, with Ray Fancher, the fourth edition of Pioneers of Psychology: A History (New York: Norton, 2011). The fourth edition is significantly expanded, with new material on personality, applied psychology, women and gender in the history of psychology, and other topics.
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Emilie Savage-Smith (University of Oxford) was recently elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Dr. Savage-Smith's A New Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Volume 1: Medicine (Oxford University Press) was published in 2011.
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Robert Smith (University of Alberta) was appointed as a Killam Annual Professor for 2011/12.
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Laura J. Snyder (St. John's University) delivered the 2011 Dibner Library Lecture at the National Museum of American History.
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Frank W. Stahnisch (University of Calgary, Alberta) has co-edited a volume in German on the Polish-German philosopher of medicine Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961). The volume, Ludwik Fleck - Denkstile und Tatsachen: Gesammelte Schriften und Zeugnisse, is available through Suhrkamp Verlag.
Between January and June 2012, Stahnisch will be a visiting professor at the Office for the History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley and will continue his work on a new book project, The Making of a New Research Field: On the Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity in the German Neuromorphological Sciences, 1910-1945.
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Liping Bu, Darwin H. Stapleton (University of Massachusetts, Boston) and Ka-che Yip, eds., announce the publication of Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia. Published by Routledge in January 2012.
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Dominique A. Tobbell's (University of Minnesota) book, Pills, Power, and Policy: The Struggle for Drug Reform in Cold War America and its Consequences is available through University of California Press and Milbank Books on Health and the Public.
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Conevery Bolton Valencius has started a new position as Assistant Professor of History at University of Massachusetts, Boston, teaching environmental history, history of American medicine and science, and the U.S. Civil War.
In Memorium: Per Fridtjof Dahl
1 August 1932–1 October 2011
Per Fridtjof Dahl, a physicist, artist, and historian of modern physics died on 1 October 2011 after a two-year struggle with lung cancer.
Per Dahl was born in Washington, D.C., on 1 August 1932. His parents were Odd Dahl, from Drammen, Norway, and Anna Augusta Vesse, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Dahl was born while his father was working at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1936, his father saw the war coming and decided to take his family back to Bergen, Norway. He returned to Norway in 1937 to oversee science in Norway during the war.
Dahl grew up in Bergen, Norway, from the age of 4 until he was 17. He then came to the U.S. and served three years in the U.S. Army, including two years stationed on Guam in the Pacific. Like his father, Dahl was interested in science and physics from an early age. He studied science during his Army years, and after leaving the service he entered the University of Wisconsin, obtaining his PhD in Physics in 1960. His post-doctoral work was done at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Per Dahl came to Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in 1963. He arrived at a time when superconductors were beginning to move from laboratory development to industrial production. At this time, development of accelerator magnets using NbTi and Nb3Sn began. Per became involved in the design of these magnets early in his BNL career and acquired a good understanding both of the materials and their use in magnets. He put this knowledge to good use later in his BNL career when he became the principal person writing about magnets and superconductors for technically-oriented audiences. This work also provided him with an opportunity to display his skills as an artist. His drawing of all the critical components of a superconducting cable is still used in talks for visitors to Brookhaven.
Per began working on the larger stage of the (SSC) in 1987, where he continued work documenting the magnet program. When the SSC effort moved from the design location, Berkeley, to the laboratory location in Texas, Per expanded his work to include both the documentation of the conventional construction effort and preparation of information in support of the SSC mission (e.g., as publisher of the SSC News).
Following termination of the SSC project in 1993, Per moved to the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). During much of that time he was on leave working for the Office of High Energy Physics, where he was Program Officer for a number of university grants. He also consulted with BNL about the nascent RHIC magnet system. He retired from LBNL in 1996 but kept contact with the lab through a visiting scientist appointment and work at the Office for the History of Science and Technology at UC-Berkeley until 2005.
Dahl is the author of numerous scientific papers and several books: From Nuclear Transmutation to Nuclear Fission, 1932–1939 (Institute of Physics Publishing, Co., Bristol, England and Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2002); Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy (Institute of Physics Publishing, Co., UK, Bristol England and Philadelphia, PA, USA, 1999), which was featured in the NOVA TV-production, Hitler's Sunken Secret, DOX Production, London, 2004; Flash of the Cathode Rays: A History of J.J. Thomson's Electron (Institute of Physics Publishing, Co., UK, Bristol, England and Philadelphia, USA, 1997); Superconductivity: Its Historical Roots and Development from Mercury to the Ceramic Oxides (American Institute of Physics, New York, 1992); Ludvig Colding and the Conservation of Energy Principle: Experimental and Philosophical Contributions, The Sources of Science N. 104 (Johnson Reprint Corp., New York and London, 1972).
Throughout his life, Dahl was able to pursue his love for physics, art and his family. While at Brookhaven, he was a president of the South Bay Art Association (1967–1968), and he was also the president of the Brookhaven National Laboratory Art Society for several years. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society.
He is survived by his devoted wife of 45 years, Eleanor, and two sons: Erik of Pebble Beach, CA; and Thomas, and two grandchildren, Emily and Alex, of Westford, MA.