Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

Abstracts of the History of Science Society 

2004 Austin Meeting 

18 – 21 November 2004 

Stephen G. Alter, Gordon College (salter@gordon.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom IV 

The Textual Sources of Darwin’s ‘Unconscious Selection’ Concept 

This paper considers the likely sources of inspiration for Darwin’s concept of “unconscious selection,” a component of his well-known 

analogy between selection in nature and “selection by man.” Darwin distinguished between methodical selection, the systematic effort 

to produce desired changes in animal and plant varieties, and unconscious selection, which brought about the same kinds of changes, 

albeit gradually and unintentionally. The latter concept’s origins present a mystery. Darwin discussed only the methodical mode in his 

transmutation notebooks of 1838-39, and the first recorded hint of the unconscious selection idea did not appear until two years later, 

in his unpublished marginalia. The probable sources of inspiration thus lie in Darwin’s extensive reading program from the intervening 

years. Yet (as Darwin noted) the familiar manuals on domestic breeding did not describe unconscious selection. I argue, therefore, 

that the key works were historical writings, mainly on general anthropology and the history of social institutions. Darwin had looked 

to such works for insight into the literally “unconscious” (i.e., instinctive) bases of human behavior, yet he also would have found here 

an emphasis on gradual and unintended historical development—the essence of the unconscious selection idea. 

Hanne Andersen, University of Copenhagen (h.andersen@medphil.ku.dk) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Big Bend D & E 

Misrepresentation or Ignorance: The Case of “The Sceptical Environmentalist” 

During the 1990s, several research agencies and institutions developed guidelines for good scientific practice and formed committees to 

handle cases of scientific misconduct. However, it remained an issue of debate how to define scientific misconduct. Several early definitions 

centered on falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism, but later suggestions were made for definitions that were broader and more 

open-ended. A central issue in the discussions of how to define scientific misconduct has been how to address questions about differences 

in interpretation, including the question how to draw a line between actual misrepresentation and simply being wrong about the 

interpretation of results. In this paper I shall illuminate these questions through an analysis of a recent case: the ruling of the Danish 

Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) about the best-selling book “The Sceptical Environmentalist” by Bjørn Lomborg. First, I 

shall give an account of the formation of the DCSD as part of an international trend, and I shall describe the later development in the 

practice of this committee. Next, I shall analyze the DCSD’s handling of the Lomborg case, including brief analyses of the complaints 

and Lomborg’s responses, the approach taken by the DCSD to the material, and the final verdict. Finally, I shall analyze the political 

aftermath of the Lomborg case, including the intervention by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and the 

revised definition of scientific misconduct. On the basis of this case I shall discuss the notion of misrepresentation, focussing on the 

special problems that may arise for modern, multidisciplinary areas of research. 

Mary Anne Andrei, University of Minnesota (andre057@umn.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom VII 

Smithsonian Taxidermy and the Birth of Wildlife Conservation 

In 1887 the U. S. National Museum (Smithsonian) created the department of living animals under the direction of William T. Hornaday, 

chief of the taxidermy division. The new specimens gave the Smithsonian’s taxidermists and osteologists the opportunity to study the 

natural habits of living animals and use this knowledge to improve their mounting techniques. Soon, however, the department was seen 

as a place to preserve endangered wildlife. In 1888 Director George Brown Goode dispatched Hornaday to the western United States 

to fill a train of empty boxcars with threatened species, including bison, a grizzly bear, and golden eagle, as well as a red fox, badgers, 

and prairie dogs. Two years later, under Hornaday’s direction, the department evolved into the National Zoo. This paper presents the 

first systematic study of the Smithsonian’s early taxidermists and osteologists and the extent to which their experience in the department 

of living animals laid the groundwork for future conservation efforts. Most notably, Hornaday later became director of the New 

York Zoological Park—the first zoo to breed endangered species in captivity for reintroduction into the wild. Hornaday’s conservation 

efforts were equaled, however, by other former members of the Smithsonian staff, particularly Frederic A. Lucas, osteologist from 1882- 

1904, who undertook the first assessment of the Smithsonian’s holdings of endangered or extinct species, served on the board of the 

Fur Seal Commission and as president of the National Audubon Society, and fought for legislation to protect right whales and elephant 

seals. 

Theodore Arabatzis, University of Athens (tarabatz@cc.uoa.gr) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom III 

Misinterpreting (correct) Experimental Results: Kaufmann’s Rejection of the Particulate Interpretation of Cathode Rays

In the late 19th century there were two conflicting interpretations of cathode rays. According to the first view, mainly endorsed by 

British physicists, they were beams of charged particles. The alternative view, favoured by German physicists, was that they were another 

species of waves in the ether. In that context, Walter Kaufmann (1871-1947) reported, in early 1897, his measurements of the magnetic 

deflection of cathode rays. He pointed out that, on the assumption that cathode rays were charged particles, those measurements 

implied that their charge to mass ratio was three orders of magnitude larger than the corresponding ratio of the ions of electrolysis. 

Furthermore, the value of that ratio depended neither on the chemical composition of the gas contained in the cathode ray tube nor 

on the material of the tube’s electrodes. Both of these implications eliminated the possibility that cathode rays were composed of electrolytical 

ions. Kaufmann then concluded, mistakenly, that the identification of cathode rg at atomic exchange during the four year period 

leading up to the establishment of the Atomic Energy Research Institute (AERI), a body comparable to the AEC. Established in 

the wake of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” address of December 1953, AERI was designed to provide South Korea with a cheap, 

efficient source of energy, power which would subsequently drive the nation’s industrial and economic recovery. The collaborative relationship 

between American researchers and their Korean counterparts was complicated, however, by tensions centering on: (1) the proper 

approach to be taken toward nuclear power (research-based versus industrial), (2) the relationship between the construction of new 

facilities and the larger Korean university community, and (3) the type and length of training necessary to undertake an atomic energy 

program. If the successful start-up of South Korea’s first research reactor in 1962, along with its first commercial reactor in 1977, 

remains in part a legacy of this early period iy those very results that were supposed to falsify its precursor. 

Katherine Arens, University of Texas, Austin (k.arens@mail.utexas.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country C 

Mach, Haeckel, and the Rejection of the “Two Cultures”: Popular Science as Epistemology in German-Language Science of the 

(Last) Fin de siècle 

At the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries, Austria and Germany attained international visibility in physics, chemistry, biology, 

and many technical fields. This presentation will take on a less familiar side to this preeminence: a large corpus of popular science 

writing by major scientists aimed at the German-speaking public. Using as case studies the Popular-Scientific Lectures (1886, 4th ed. 1916) 

and Knowledge and Error (1905) by (physicist, 1838-1916) and The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1899) by Ernst 

Haeckel (evolutionary biologist, 1834-1919), this presentation will argue for the significance of such texts not simply as publicity for the 

pure sciences, but as a significant force in establishing science as a dominant social paradigm for scientists and lay people alike. Not 

popularized in the common sense of the term, these texts are at pains to present cognitively accessible thought experiments to the general 

public, and thus to bridge the general world view of the era and the specific scientific world view of front-end theory. Thus Mach’s 

famous thought experiments are recast as observations of historical and natural phenomena, to make the case by examples that the point 

of view of the observer and the anthropocentric rationality often imposed on analytic frames may need to be questioned. Haeckel takes 

on a more difficult project in evolutionary biology, teaching through the Riddle of the Universe how biological evidence of historical 

process ought to be thought through — including in a speculative mode that tacitly combats what today might be called creationism. 

Such very visible texts, I argue, create a Central European environment for science that integrates ethical-social considerations (and questions 

of historical hermeneutics) with the pure sciences, and creates a very different epistemological claim for science and scientific theory-building. 

The most specific results of this approach are a rejection of a purely mathematical approach to modeling of natural 

processes and an insistence on the physicality and cultural position of the observer, rather than an assertion of neutrality. Thus, just as 

Canguilhem argued for early modern science, and as Roger Caillois did for species biology in the twentieth century, Mach and Haeckel 

take their sciences as fundamental determined by social processes rather than as theory in its own right, rejecting the very idea of “two 

cultures” and the competition for resources, status, and validity which that notion is predicated on. 

Jean-Francois Auger, Universite Louis-Pasteur, Strasbourg (jean-francois.auger@gersulp.u-strasbg.fr) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country C 

The Cultural Meaning of Leon Provancher’s Entomological Collections, 1877-1980 

At the end of the ninetieth century, the French Canadian naturalist and priest, Leon Provancher, built entomological collections containing 

more than one thousand previously unknown species of hymenoptera. Still in existence today, the collections are consulted by 

entomologists for research in systematic. In this paper we explore how the cultural meaning of this scientific artefact has been shaped 

by scientific, educational and political considerations. Provancher built insect collections according to his fixist and anti-evolutionist 

beliefs. He wanted to contemplate God’s creation, publish insect descriptions in his journal, Le Naturaliste canadien, and exchange correspondence 

with North-American natural historians. Provancher’s first collection was given for reference purposes to the Quebec 

Department of Agriculture in 1877, and the second was bought for courses in natural history by the College of Levis in 1888. After the 

naturalist’s death in 1892, a third collection was acquired by the Quebec Museum of Public Instruction. The collections were used as 

teaching tools for college students in natural history and for reference purposes in economic entomology by civil servants. The two collections 

possessed by the government were finally brought together in the Provincial Museum in 1933. They were used by American 

entomologists for work in systematic and were visited by Quebec City citizens during public exhibitions. The collections had been physically 

altered when the type specimens were put into separate drawers by the curator, according to the international standard code in 

entomology. When the museum began to specialize its collection in the arts, the entomological collections were transferred to the 

Department of Biology at Laval University in 1962 according to an agreement with de Quebec Department of Culture. They were used 

to train entomologists in master’s and doctoral degrees. The remaining collection was kept by the College of Levis in its museum of his-

tory as an object of public curiosity. In conclusion, we will discuss the assumption that scientific artefacts are constructed, modified and 

preserved according to cultural factors. 

Davis Baird, University of South Carolina (db@sc.edu) 


Atomic Precision: Rowland’s Dictum and Nanotechnology 

Henry A. Rowland (1848-1901) is justly famous for his ability to make high-precision machinery work right. For two generations his diffraction 

gratings, ruled with up to 30,000 lines/inch, were the best in the world. Rowland’s success was due in part to his understanding 

of error. This is captured in the motto for Rowland’s laboratory known as “Rowland’s Dictum:” “No mechanism operates perfectly—its 

design must make up for imperfections.” Rowland’s ruling engine, on which he made his spectacular gratings, is a marvel of 

Rowland’s dictum in action. Here, then is one entry point to understand the importance of error in experimental science. However, the 

primary thrust of my paper concerns nanotechnology. I aim to use Rowland’s dictum as a tool to examine recent claims that nanotechnology 

will provide “atomic-level precision.” When we work with bulk materials—even on a very small micrometer scale—we understand 

that all attempts to fabricate and measure are subject to error. We speak of 100 microns ± 0.1 micron. But when we operate on 

the nanoscale, “with atomic precision,” we are speaking of putting a single layer of atoms just so, or building a polymer molecule with 

exactly 100 atoms. Richard Feynman in his well-known talk “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” writes as follows: “Another thing we will 

notice is that, if we go down far enough, all of our devices can be mass produced so that they are absolutely perfect copies of one 

another. We cannot build two large machines so that the dimensions are exactly the same. But if your machine is only 100 atoms high, 

you only have to get it correct to one-half of one percent to make sure the other machine is exactly the same size—namely, 100 atoms 

high!” When measurement and fabrication is now measured in relatively small numbers of discrete more-or-less easily countable units— 

either the molecule has 100 atoms in it or not—we seem finally to be able to defeat error. But, of course, all the measurement and fabrication 

at the nanoscale is done with “mechanisms,” and as Rowland’s dictum reminds us, “No mechanism operates perfectly.” So the 

questions I examine are where do the errors creep in, how do nanoscale measurement and fabrication devices control for them, and 

what, in the end, should we understand by claims to “atomic-level precision.” 

Avner Ben-Zaken, Harvard Society of Fellows (avner@ucla.edu avnerbz@yahoo.com) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country A 

The Decade When the Sky Fell and A New Astronomy Arose 

In 1574 the Ottoman Sultan Murâd III invited Taqî al-Dîn to build an observatory in Istanbul. With Taqî al-Dîn’s exceptional knowledge 

in the arts of mechanics, he was able to construct instruments and to build mechanical clocks for an observation of the comet of 

1577. In the same decade, Tycho Brahe settled in Uraniborg, from where he observed the same comet and made observations until the 

end of the century. The last observatory of Islam and the first significant observatory of Europe coexisted for years. Current historiography 

tends to present the two projects as developing along separate linear paths. Sharper examination,though, will show a situation 

in which two diplomatic and ideological opponents addressed the same astronomical phenomena. Might the two have been aware of 

each other? 

Richard Beyler, Portland State University (beylerr@pdx.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country B 

Boundaries and Authority in the Physics Community in the Third Reich 

A commonplace in discussions of the history of science in the National Socialist era has been the question whether science “retained 

its freedom” under National Socialism or not. This was especially the case in the immediate post-war period among critiques of and 

apologias for conduct among the historical actors themselves, above on the context of the denazification process, but the question has 

also spilled over into more recent historiographical discourse. There have been three predominant kinds of response: straightforward 

affirmation, straightforward denial, and turning the question towards the applicability of the concept of “freedom” altogether. This 

paper will use the example of the German Physical Society under National Socialism to examine these questions. 

Mario Biagioli, Harvard University (biagioli@fas.harvard.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom VI 

Intellectual Property in Early Modern Instruments: Galilei vs. Capra 

This paper discusses the relative success of the tactics developed by early modern artisans and mathematicians to protect their commercial 

interests, priority claims, and intellectual credit for the instruments they produced. After a general discussion of the resources and 

constraints associated with these various tactics, I will propose a revisionist analysis of the 1607 dispute that pitted Galileo against 

Baldessarre Capra a dispute that concerned the inventorship of the so-called “geometrical and military compass.” Galileo had been selling 

such instruments since the late 1590s and had published a book on their use in 1606. The dispute between Galileo and Capra was 

not treated as a case of “patent infringement” but rateher as a case of book piracy (as both Capra and Galileo had published books on 

the instrument. The Venetian authorities ruled in Galileo’s case. I want to show that although Galileo won easily and swiftly, the ques-

tions it raised were not resolved either by Galileo or by the court, and that they remain relevant to modern debates about the use of 

both copyright and patents to protect intellectual property claims in scientific findings. 

Christina Brandt, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (brandt@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) 


Between Fact and Fiction: Bioscientific Research and Early Debates About Cloning and Genetic Engineering in Germany 

This paper analyzes scientific and cultural layers in the history of cloning. It addresses the relationship between bioscientific research, 

popular representations and public debates that flourished around the figure of the “clone”. The focus will be on the life sciences in 

Germany from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. This period can be characterized by two major scientific events: First, John Gurdon´s 

(Oxford) success in cloning frogs in the early 1960s gave rise to fantastical representations around the figure of the “clone”. Second, 

these popular debates about cloning experienced both their highpoint and a temporary halt in the early 1980s when Karl Illmensee 

(Geneva) announced that he was able to clone mice but shortly afterwards his claims were disproved. In the first part of the paper, I 

will follow scientific developments in German developmental biology by focussing on research at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratorium 

of the Max Planck Society in Tuebingen. The second part will examine the public debates about cloning and genetic engineering in 

Germany with attention given to the demarcation between scientific facts and popular fiction. By comparing these German developments 

to those in the United States and Great Britain, the paper will try to specify at which level national peculiarities played a part in 

an internationally organized scientific landscape building up in the second half of the 20th century. 

Sabine Brauckmann, KLI (sabine.brauckmann@kli.ac.at) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom VI 

‘’Cells Migrate and Shape’’: A Historical Sketch of Developmental Fate Maps 

My talk presents a historical chapter of developmental physiology by focusing on Walter Vogt (1888-1941) and Sven Hörstadius (1898- 

1996), two experimental biologists, and on two conceptions, namely the gastrea theory and the gradient notion. Further, I want to show 

(1) how developmental physiology depicted the migration and shaping of cells during gastrulation in fate maps and (2)how the gradient 

concept as formulated by Boveri was finally confirmed. The crucial issue comparative anatomy and embryology tried to solve around 

1880 was how the mesoderm forms and whether it proceeds by invagination or delamination. However, it was difficult to reconstruct 

these morphogenetic movements by observing whole or sectioned embryos alone. Besides an experimental turn, technical improvements 

like micrometer, vital staining methods, and apochromatic objectives helped to label the cells of the three germ layers and to follow 

their fate at successive intervals during gastrulation. By these new methods, the classical disciplines slowly overcame their descriptive 

state and moved towards the more dynamical representation of developmental mechanics. In the 1920s Vogt perfected the staining 

method and constructed more or less idealized fate maps of the toad Bombinator. For him, the results corroborated Haeckel’s gastrea 

theory. Vogt’s research revolutionized comparative embryology and formed the basis for interpreting developmental physiology. A few 

years later Hörstadius embarked on an experimental program with sea urchins hoping to solve the question of the temporal determination 

of invagination. His main objective was to improve on the data of Morgan and Driesch who had estimated the invaginating material 

by counting nuclei. With his technique of fine glass needles and Vogt’s staining method, Hörstadius could now trace the fate of the 

various cell groups into the later larva at their exact temporal determination. His data corrected the old invagination explanation of gastrulation 

and secured the gradient concept. Besides the narrative of developmental fate mapping, my main objective is to demonstrate 

the conceptual difference in their research programs. For, Vogt’s work was firmly rooted in homology studies of the 19th century whereas 

Hörstadius concentrated on embryonic cells and intercellular communication. 

Richard Burkhardt, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (burkhard@uiuc.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom VI 

Ordering and Coordinating Naturalists’ Practices in Restoration France 

The distinction between the naturalist voyager and the cabinet naturalist predates but does not map seamlessly onto the later contrast 

between the field naturalist and the lab or museum worker. One reason for this is that the primary task of naturalist voyagers, at least 

as conceived by those who most often sponsored their travels, was to collect specimens for study and display back in museums, not to 

pursue field studies as such. In the years immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris made 

special efforts to encourage the collecting efforts of travelers, colonial officials, sea captains, and, most notably, a select number of individuals 

whom the Museum paid to be naturalist voyagers. The present paper looks at the naturalist voyagers on the Museum’s payroll 

from 1815 to 1830, examining in particular the ways in which their own interests and their actual practices in the field corresponded to 

or diverged from the aims of the institution that sponsored them. 

D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University (dburnett@princeton.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom III 

Whales and the Cold War: The First International Symposium on Cetacean Research 

From the 15th to the 18th of August, 1963, more than fifty scientists from around the world gathered in the “John Glenn Suite” of the

Marriott Motor Lodge in Washington, D.C. for a meeting billed as “The First International Symposium on Cetacean Research.” Funded 

by the Office of Naval Research and organized by the American Institute of Biological Science, this event marked a major development 

in the twentieth-century history of marine mammal biology. In addition to demonstrating a new level of federal funding available for 

research on cetaceans, the meeting drew together a remarkably diverse group of investigators-whaling-industry-linked zoologists, marine 

park trainers, naval experts in underwater acoustics trained in anti-submarine warfare, neurophysiologists and anthropologists-all of 

whom had an interest in these anomalous and fugitive animals. Despite this heterogeneity, the published proceedings (Kenneth Norris, 

ed., _Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises_ [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966]) became a landmark reference work during a 

pivotal decade in the history of human relationships with whales and dolphins-the decade from 1962-1972, which saw crisis in the 

International Whaling Commission, the rise of the “save the whales” movement, and the emergence of a perception that cetaceans were 

not resources to be exploited, but rather charged symbols of human environmental irresponsibility. In this paper I will use this meeting 

as the point of departure for an effort to answer the following questions: Who in the world was studying whales and dolphins in 

1963? Where? Why were they doing so? Answering these questions will demand a set of excursions-loops out and away from the conference 

presentations themselves-that will follow the participants back to their laboratories and research environments, reconstruct their 

training and disciplinary formation, and endeavor to contextualize their interest in cetaceans. This work will make it possible to examine 

several significant misunderstandings and disagreements that emerged from the meeting, divergences which had enduring scientific 

and cultural consequences. 

James Steven Byrne, Princeton University (jbyrne@princeton.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom VI 

Regiomontanus’s Padua Oration in the University Context 

In 1464, the German astronomer and mathematician Regiomontanus gave an oration on the dignity, utility, and history of the mathematical 

sciences at the University of Padua. This oration has come to be seen as exemplary of the humanist revival of ancient mathematics 

that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I will discuss Regiomontanus’s oration in the context of his background 

as a university student and master, illustrating the extent to which his histories of the mathematical arts rely on this tradition. I will also 

comment on the ease with which university mathematics (in contrast to other scholastic disciplines) could be presented as humanist. 

David Cahan, University of Nebraska (dcahan@unlnotes.unl.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM -Texas Ballroom III 

The Scientific Tourist: Helmholtz in Gilded Age America 

In 1893, Hermann von Helmholtz journeyed to America as the official head of Germany’s delegation to the International Electrical 

Congress, which met in late August as part of the Columbia World’s Exhibition in Chicago. To that official sojourn to settle international 

electrical standards and to represent German science and culture at large, Helmholtz added unofficial visits to see scientists and 

universities in several other cities: New York, Cambridge and Boston, Baltimore, and Washington. During the course of his seven-week 

stay in America Helmholtz met numerous leading scientists and university administrators, and was received as scientific royalty by them, 

by the press, and by the American government. In analyzing Helmholtz’s tour of scientific America, including the many people he met 

and the institutions he visited, this presentation simultaneously addresses several larger thematic issues in American scientific life, including: 

the public portrayal of a close relationship of science and technology, the emergence of new or the reform of older scientific institutions, 

the general sense of growth and vitality of several local scientific communities, and the heroic and iconic treatment of 

Helmholtz by Americans in search of national recognition and ties to European culture. 

Victoria Cain, Columbia University, (vec5@columbia.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-4, 9:00 - 11:45 AM -Texas Ballroom VII 

“SELLING” ANIMALS: Consumption and Conservation in American Natural History Museums, 1900-1930 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, American natural history museums assumed an increasingly aggressive stance in favor of conservation, 

and sought to educate their visitors accordingly. Museum directors and curators gave lectures, wrote articles, and participated 

in political campaigns in order to heighten public awareness of the rapid destruction and possible extinction of American wildlife. They 

also began to create exhibits designed to inspire awe and sympathy for the natural world. By presenting lifelike American fauna in spectacular 

natural settings, museum officials hoped to convince visitors that such animals and environments were worth saving. To make 

their exhibits more persuasive, curators borrowed techniques from the window and display design of the department stores so influential 

in this period. Museum exhibits increasingly used the techniques commercial establishments employed to make goods more desirable 

to consumers. These strategies of enticement proved wildly effective, and museum officials throughout the United States congratulated 

themselves on their use of commercial means to accomplish educational and conservationist ends. And yet, the success of this 

kind of display also unnerved many curators. They worried these displays were too visually compelling, and that museum visitors left 

coveting the displayed animals, rather than hoping to preserve them. Some curators, aware of the influence of the spectacle they presented, 

refused to display endangered or particularly beautiful animals in habitat dioramas, fearing the desire evoked by such exhibitions 

would result in more harm than help for the animals depicted. Despite these protests, American natural history museums continued 

“selling” nature to a receptive public. Inserted into elaborate displays, animals were commodified into interchangeable goods. This short 

paper will examine the alternately complementary and contradictory relationship between consumption and conservation at the begin-

ning of the twentieth century as it was played out in habitat dioramas and other museum exhibits. The evolution of these museum 

exhibits not only illustrates the influence of commercial entertainment on representations of the natural world, but also begs scholars 

to ask if the ethos and practices of consumption and national conservation are ultimately mutually exclusive. 

Jimena Canales, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (jcanales@mit.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country B 

AUTO, NOMOS, and MATIC: Boundaries Between “Impersonal” and “Personal” Representations 

In 1929 the experimental psychologist Edwin Boring considered all attempts to eliminate individual errors in scientific measurements 

through graphic methods “a paradox” since “there can be no observation without an observer.” Although observation could never be 

entirely eliminated from science, Boring acknowledged that the automatic recording and inscription instruments used by scientists significantly 

reduced individual differences. During the nineteenth century the French astronomer Jules Janssen, creator of the photographic 

revolver and one of the chief advocates of scientific photography, was particularly responsible for establishing new “impersonal” 

imaging techniques in science. This paper analyzes the standards that made scientists consider these images “impersonal” and shows 

how these criteria were contested by alternative artists (such as Zola) and scientists (such as Trouvelot). These standards, I claim, were 

connected to late nineteenth-century efforts to circumscribe the field of art as autonomous. Janssen actively supported the autonomous 

movement in the arts, first associated with Romanticism and later with Aestheticism. By looking at the role of scientists in the 

autonomous movement in the arts, it will become patent that science and scientists served in the programmatic concealment of the 

functions of purportedly purposeless art. Concomitantly, it was precisely in contrast to the alleged autonomy of art that science was 

found to speak truthfully about the world. 

Cathryn Carson, University of California, Berkeley (clcarson@socrates.berkeley.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom II 

Science, Politics, and Instrumental Reason: Heidegger, Habermas, Heisenberg 

If post-WWII German intellectuals agreed on one thing, it was the instrumental character of modern natural science. Science was technological 

in essence; it approached the world from the standpoint of manipulation, mastery, and control. This notion did not arise in a 

vacuum. Growing from intellectual roots in Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Weber, it was worked out in direct dialogue with contemporary science 

and politics. The paired cases of Martin Heidegger and Jürgen Habermas make this context plain. In particular, each played off 

the figure of Werner Heisenberg, a dominant actor in both West German science policy and humanistic understandings of science. For 

Heidegger and Habermas, Heisenberg came to figure as a last hope for deviation from the modern narrative of instrumentality, as science 

placed itself in the service of technological and political power; and then, as he changed and they changed, in strangely parallel 

fashion, as the age’s unthinking embodiment instead. The paper explores their exchanges as intellectual history and political history of 

science. It seeks to explain how a new political consensus about science, crossing ideological divides, captured German intellectuals by 

the 1960s – at the same moment, ironically, as the federal government finally made the leap to a real science policy. 

Christopher Carter, Duke University (crc5@duke.edu) 


Herschel, Humboldt, and Imperial Science 

In the nineteenth century, geophysics and empire building developed in tandem, resulting in global science. Those sciences which focus 

upon the measurement of geophysical phenomena have come to be known to historians as “Humboldtian” because of the zeal of their 

promoter. In 1836, Humboldt challenged the Royal Society to establish observatories in British colonies for such scientific pursuits. 

Despite early attempts to carry out this plan, none were successful until the participation of John Herschel. Several elements made 

Herschel the ideal individual to carry out Humboldt’s proposed scheme. First, his philosophy of science held that inductive research 

had to occur on a vast scale in order to provide the logical necessity for physical laws. Second, his own colonial experiences while 

observing the Southern Hemisphere from the Cape Colony had convinced him of the scientific utility of colonial outposts. Finally, his 

almost unique position as an aristocrat who had inherited the scientific prestige of his father, famed astronomer William Herschel, 

placed him in a position to interact both with members of Britain’s ruling class as well as its scientists. Herschel provided a crucial connection 

between philosophical, political and social elements. As a result, empirical science utilized the imperial structure to conduct 

research on a worldwide scale. At Herschel’s instigation, colonial observatories were added to the British venture for an Antarctic expedition 

known as the Magnetic Crusade. Herschel has often been portrayed as no more than the celebrity spokesman for this project, or 

else merely drafted into an existing plan really carried out by others. I argue that Herschel’s influence was necessary not only for the 

success of the scientific lobby, but also in shaping the final form of the project. The results of the Crusade were the culmination of 

efforts in which Herschel had been involved for years. 

David Cassidy, Hofstra University (chmdcc@optonline.net) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom II 

Militarized Science: J. Robert Oppenheimer as Federal Science Advisor 

The stunning practical success of American military research during World War II propelled J. Robert Oppenheimer and a handful of 

others like him to national prominence as statesmen of science at the highest levels of government and culture, casting them in new 

roles that required difficult adjustments for them and their audience. As both physicist and cultural icon during the early cold war,

Oppenheimer stood at the intersection between federal demands upon militarized scientific research and the traditional ideals of enlightened 

science. This paper will explore the institutional and policy structure of cold war physics, Oppenheimer’s strategies as the nation’s 

leading science advisor for negotiating his vision of science and the state, how those strategies ultimately failed, and some striking parallels 

today as science advising experiences a similar crisis. 

Frederick Churchill, Indiana University, (churchil@indiana.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM – Texas Ballroom III 

The Biogenetic Law and its Paradoxes 

Common wisedom has held that Ernst Haeckel’s Fundamental Biogenetic Law reigned as part of a Darwinian-morphological paradigm, 

despite some scathing contemporary objections, until the first decades of the twentieth century. By then, as traditional accounts continue, 

experimental embryology, Mendelian genetics and the weight of Haeckel’s own illogical pronouncements brought the paradigm to 

a rather abrupt end and replaced it with an early Twentieth Century outlook where experimentation, classical genetics, physiology and/or 

different professional standards ruled. This explanation in terms of an historical “discontinuity” presents definite problems, which will 

be explored and perhaps explained (in part). 

Deborah Coen, Harvard University (coen@fas.harvard.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM – Texas Ballroom V 

Beyond Public and Private: Science and Liberalism in Imperial Austria 

Both historians of science and political historians have traditionally drawn a sharp division between the “public” and the “private.” 

According to traditional political histories of Central Europe, civic consciousness and rational discourse took root exclusively in the public 

sphere, the first through the rise of voluntary associations, the second through the spread of natural science. Science thus appears 

as a quintessentially public activity, from which private concerns were at best distractions. Indeed, in the historiography particularly of 

Vienna circa 1900, the home typically appears as the inversion of the public sphere: the antithesis of a voluntary association, an escape 

from political engagement, a realm of interiority and irrational emotions. Recently, however, Central European historians have begun to 

challenge this dichotomy, demonstrating that middle class homes were crucial sites for liberal self-fashioning and the negotiation of 

political and economic power. The political and scientific significance of family life emerges clearly from my research on the most 

prominent family of scientists in imperial Vienna, the Exners. For the Exners and others in their social network, the cultivation of the 

domestic sphere was itself a political activity. Through an experiment in living communally as an extended family, the Exners sought 

solutions to the central dilemma of Austrian liberalism: how to guard against the dogmatic absolutism of their clerical opponents without 

giving up ground to the radical relativism of their left-wing challengers. 

Jamie Cohen-Cole, University of Chicago (jamiecc@uchicago.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM – Texas Ballroom V 

Experimental Psychology and the Professional Politics of Thinking About Thinking 

In the mid 20th century experimental psychology experienced a revolution in its model of human nature as cognitive science replaced 

behaviorism. This transition involved understanding people as active, creatively thinking beings, rather than as organisms that simply 

respond to environmental conditions. Philosophy of science was at the center of this transformation. Behaviorists held to a positivist 

line, and argued that science was a matter of recording and accounting for observable phenomena. They, as a consequence, left little 

space for consideration of such unobservable phenomena as mental processes. On the other hand, cognitive scientists followed an antipositivist 

philosophy. They argued that science was and should be not primarily an empirical process. To early cognitive scientist,s science 

was theory-driven even to the point that theory determined and structured data. In arguing this anti-positivist philosophy, cognitive 

scientists made room for their own theories and inferences about the human mind. Even more significant however is that cognitive 

scientists ascribed such anti-positivism not only to themselves, but also to humans more generally. In the process, the normative 

philosophy of science (or “good academic thinking”) that cognitive scientists use to reshape the discipline of psychology became, at the 

same time, the descriptive (and nominally value free) model of human nature. 

Alix Cooper, SUNY-Stony Brook (acooper@notes.cc.sunysb.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM – Texas Ballroom V 

The Nature of Home: Work, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Natural History 

In early modern Europe, the pursuit of natural knowledge was, in great part, a family enterprise. In the course of researching women’s 

contributions to science, and more broadly issues of gender in science, historians of science have begun, over the past several decades, 

to uncover the numerous ways in which the actual practice of science in fields ranging from astronomy to botany depended on women’s 

unpaid (and often unrecognized) labor. As scholars like Londa Schiebinger have shown, wives and daughters frequently made the observations 

or performed the calculations required to sustain their male relatives’ scientific projects. What I propose to do in my paper is 

to apply these insights more generally to the early modern family as a whole. In particular, I would like to explore the ways in which, 

within the field of natural history, research projects came to become the collective responsibility of entire households across generations—i.e. 

involving not only wives or daughters, but also sons, for example, as they attempted to complete their fathers’ projects, 

and to make complex decisions about the division of scientific labor and the credit for that labor. Drawing on my research into 

cases such as that of the Breyne family of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Danzig, whose natural-historical observations

extended over three generations, and about whom a remarkable body of evidence survives, I hope to trace some of the complex ways 

in which issues of work, gender, and power shaped the enterprise of early modern natural history. 

Donald Cotter, Mount Holyoke College (wdcotter@mtholyoke.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country A 

A Converted Organic Chemist” and the Invention of American General Chemistry 

Although Alexander Smith (1864 – 1922) has been regarded as a minor figure in the history of American chemistry, his 1906 textbook, 

“Introduction to General Inorganic Chemistry”, was sufficiently innovative to make it, arguably, the first recognizably modern general 

chemistry text in English. Its novelty, and its continuing influence over the dissemination of chemical knowledge in the United States, 

arise from its successful synthesis of Ionist physical chemistry, pervasive mathematization, and a distinctly professionalist approach to 

collegiate education. After introducing the case for Smith’s significance, this paper traces influential factors in Smith’s intellectual development 

and their consequences. Over the course of his first decade at the University of Chicago (1893 – 1903), Smith abandoned the 

organic chemistry of his training. Reasons for this remarkable professional transformation can be found in the confluence of many factors, 

including his research as a graduate student and as a newly independent professional, his relationship with influential elders (his 

Ph.D. advisor, Ludwig Claisen, and his chairman at Chicago, John Ulric Nef), the difficult departmental politics at Chicago, and the sharp 

distinction between the epistemological and ontological styles of the organic and physical chemistries of the day. Attention to the ways 

in which scientific knowledge is disseminated has revealed much about the practice of science and its growth. Smith’s story is an important 

part of that matrix that deserves to be better known. 

Hunter Crowther-Heyck, University of Oklahoma (hch@ou.edu) 

Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom II 

The Program “Is” the Theory: The Search for a New Language for the Behavioral Sciences in Postwar America 

One of the great challenges confronting researchers in the biological and social sciences has been the representation of complex, path 

dependent systems, from the evolution of species in an ecosystem to the processes of learning and cognition in the human mind. In 

the mid-20th century, a number of changes in science, philosophy, and machinery combined to make the rigorous, formal analysis of 

such organic phenomena appear to be newly feasible. At the same time, changes in the broader social context made such analyses newly 

marketable, especially to military patrons. This paper will discuss three such attempts: the early postwar use of information theory and 

game theory by experimental psychologists, such as George Miller, who were interested in understanding language, learning and other 

sequential actions; the contemporaneous employment of information theory, game theory, and servomechanism theory by decision theorists 

and operations researchers, such as Merrill Flood, who were interested in creating decision rules; and the subsequent embrace of 

the computer program by cognitive psychologists, such as Herbert Simon, who saw the program as the only appropriate formalism for 

the description of complex, adaptive systems. All of these innovations shared a common origin in the need to develop new formalisms 

in which one could describe contingent, sequential actions, and many of them shared an institutional locus: the organized effort by the 

National Defense Research Council and the military research agencies to apply mathematics to the problems of modern warfare, especially 

gunnery control, logistics, and human-machine interactions. 

Scott Curtis, Northwestern University (scurtis@northwestern.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM – Texas Ballroom VII 

As Tangible as Tissue: Arnold Gesell, Infant Behavior, and Film Analysis 

Arnold Gesell, one of the most influential voices in developmental psychology, based his claims regarding normative child development 

on the thousands of feet of motion picture film he took of hundreds of children at the Clinic for Child Development at Yale University 

between 1924 and the late 1940s. From these motion picture films, Gesell drew individual frames to illustrate his seminal work, An 

Atlas of Infant Behavior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), which is still a standard text. In a foundational article published 

in 1935, he outlines the advantages of cinematography for behavior study, focusing especially on the detail the film record holds 

for the researcher: “The cinema records the behavior events in such coherent, authentic, and measurable detail that for the purposes of 

study and research the reaction patterns of the infant become as tangible as tissue.” This presentation will outline Gesell’s method of 

filming, his method of analysis, and his assumptions about film, quantification, behavior, and the “tangibility” of that behavior. The 

paper argues that Gesell’s method was designed, first, to manage the detail of the cinematic image, and second, to extract useful, quantifiable 

information from that image. How he did this tells us much about both the state of child psychology at the time and the scientific 

use of motion pictures in general. 

Lucia Dacome, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL (l.dacome@ucl.ac.uk) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom VII 

Seeing Enlightenments: Anatomical Models and the Visual Regimes of the Body in Eighteenth-Century Italy 

Anatomical models in wax promised to provide accurate insights into the inner body. Regarded as potential replacements of the natural 

body, they offered a means to overcome traditional shortcomings related to the physical deterioration, bad smells and risks of contamination 

that characterized the messy setting of anatomical dissection. Sponsored by pope Benedict XIV and integrated among 

Grand Tour attractions, in mid- eighteenth-century Bologna anatomical models were regarded as curiosities as well as teaching 

objects, were turned into part of the local heritage, and stimulated a sense of collective pride and identity. As such, models lay at the 

centre of a composite world of social interaction, and opened up the way to new forms of authorship related to the expertise of

wax-modellers. For example, they granted fame and authority to a woman like the Bolognese Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714–1774), 

who continued to be celebrated in local gazettes as well as in Grand Tour reports into the nineteenth century. This paper will explore 

the social life of anatomical models by focusing on the socio-historical setting in which anatomical models contributed to re-define 

the notions of evidence and credibility supporting medical claims about the body. 

Dane Thor Daniel, Dibner Institute, MIT (danethor@mit.edu) 

Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom VII 

The Wandering Magus: Paracelsus’ Medical Practice 

Paracelsus is well-known for his invectives against the medical practice of university-trained physicians. He chastised their reliance on 

Aristotle and Galen and instead emphasized the medical import of alchemy, natural magic, and radical spiritualism. Paracelsus’ theories 

have received much attention, but surprisingly little notice has been paid to the medical applications of his natural philosophy. Thus, in 

this paper I will first characterize Paracelsus’ itinerant medical practice and then examine two of his medical prescriptions. I will argue 

that the relationship between Paracelsus’ theory and practice is a complex one. Sometimes his speculative matter theory plays an important 

role in his medical practice, but at other times he ignores his novel chemistry and reverts to traditional cures. To begin, I will show 

that Paracelsus’ practice was a mixture of preaching, alchemy, and surgery in the service of various European armies. I will underscore 

his promotion of magical powers and poisons, and belittlement of the establishment. Having discussed his medical context, I will then 

look at two prescriptions written by Paracelsus. The first is housed in the National Library of Vienna and the second is contained in 

his fascinating correspondence with Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was briefly one of his patients. I examine these documents in terms 

of Paracelsus’ lengthy discussions on the material cosmos and its relevance to his therapeutic chemistry. The Vienna prescription shows 

that Paracelsus clearly dug into traditional medical practices, such as those associated with Galen, and not his speculative matter theory. 

However, his suggestions to Erasmus were less conservative and incorporated his innovative chemistry. The picture that emerges is one 

of two seemingly different approaches. On the one hand, one might see a chasm between theory and practice, between words and 

deeds. On the other hand, there are important ways in which his magically laced matter theory surfaces fruitfully and predominately in 

his treatment of patients. As I emphasize in the conclusion, Paracelsus wrote voluminously about his chemical theory, and yet many 

questions remain regarding how his speculations actually influenced his practice of medicine. While scholars of Paracelsiana agree that 

Paracelsus’ followers clearly sought to apply elements of his speculative philosophy to their medicine, they tend to argue that this was 

not the case with Paracelsus himself. By pointing to the complexities of Paracelsus’ medical practice, however, I show that the issue 

deserves further examination. 

Deepanwita Dasgupta, University of Minnesota (dasgu007@umn.edu) 


The Story of Engineering Education in India: Science Education within the Framework of a Colonial Requirement 

The present paper tells the story of a diffusion of_scientific/technological knowledge within a colonial context, that of 19 th century 

British India. It is argued that in general diffusion proceeds_through two important patterns: colonization by another society or reconstruction/ 

reorganization of a society’s knowledge base under its own policy. 19th century British India was an example of the first kind. 

This theme is explored by analyzing the story of the engineering education in 19th century India. As an example of diffusion within 

colonial requirements, which was fundamentally flawed, we notice that it was remarkably under-productive in spite of much 

Government rhetoric. Overall, this was a case where the proposal to generate‚ technical knowledge or to ensure its integration‚ into 

indigenous knowledge failed to find a home within the parameters of colonial government policy. I argue that this episode gives us 

valuable clues on what to avoid for a successful knowledge transfer. The basic process of colonialism does not support a mechanism 

of positive feedback, which is essential for transfer and therefore defeats its own civilizing mission. Indeed, the above analysis shows 

why educational/research institutions of science in India often arose as a form of protest within the colonial framework. Growth of 

Indian science thus took place through a mechanism which may be characteristic of colonial transfers. 

Frederick R. Davis, Florida State University (fdavis@fsul.edu) 


The Naturalist Tradition and the Evolution of Conservation Biology 

Throughout the twentieth century, the naturalist tradition thrived in the Department of Zoology at the University of Florida. One of 

the strongest proponents of natural history was Archie Carr, who was the world’s leading authority on the ecology and conservation of 

sea turtles at the time of his death in 1987. Early in his career, Carr prepared classic natural histories and taxonomic studies of turtles. 

Later he studied the ecology and migrations of sea turtles. This research indicated that sea turtles needed conservation measures. Based 

on his scientific studies, Carr knew that only international efforts would protect such wide-ranging species. As director of the Marine 

Turtle Group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Carr advocated for such campaigns, and his activism 

anticipated the evolution of conservation biology as a new discipline.

Mioara Deac, University of Notre Dame (mioara.deac.1@nd.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom V 

Psychology, Vision, and the Late Nineteenth-Century Modernist Project 

My paper is an exploration of the connections between the late nineteenth-century ‘psychology of the unconscious’ and the project of 

aesthetic modernism. Drawing from the Kantian theme of the sublime, J. F. Lyotard has argued that modernity strove to make visible 

something that could be conceived but could not be seen. The endeavor of ‘visualizing the unseen’ was a pervasive theme in psychology, 

art, and physical sciences in the late nineteenth century: Symbolist art tried to render visible ‘the optical unconscious’, while the 

newly discovered X-rays, as well as various photo-chemical techniques, tried to visualize a ‘previously unseen’ world through scientific 

methods. Also, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the concept of the unconscious diffused from the philosophical realm 

into the psychological conceptualizations of the human mind, becoming by the turn of the century one of the master metaphors in 

psychiatry. The speculative approach of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann was woven into a new cloth: what was unprecedented in 

the 1880s was the attempt to ‘visualize’ the unconscious through psychological research. I examine the experimental and clinical investigation 

of phenomena such as hypnotism, hysteria, and hallucinations, in the psychological work of Alfred Binet, Harlow Gale, Morton 

Prince, Pierre Janet, Frederick Myers, and Frank Podmore. I relate these trends in psychology to the ‘yearning for visualizability’ and 

the desire to ‘stabilize’ metaphysics, which characterized also the aesthetic modernity in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. 

Michael R Dietrich, Dartmouth College (michael.dietrich@dartmouth.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom III 

Reviving the Hopeful Monster: Richard Goldschmidt and Saltational Evolution 

Beginning in 1932, Richard Goldschmidt championed a saltational theory of evolution that integrated developmental biology, evolutionary 

biology, and genetics. While Goldschmidt’s efforts won him a reputation as a “scientific heretic,” his approach was not forgotten. 

In fact, a small but growing group of biologists have maintained an interest in Goldschmidt’s ideas and approach. This interest in 

Goldschmidt’s saltational ideas of hopeful monsters and developmental macromutations has become even more pronounced during the 

recent surge of research in evo-devo. In this paper I will survey Goldschmidt’s saltational ideas and their subsequent fate in the biological 

community. I will argue that contemporary researchers who invoke Goldschmidt’s saltational ideas do not seem to be trading on 

his reputation as a heretic in the same way as had earlier “neo-Goldschmidtians.” The current revival of Goldschmidt’s views does not 

indicate that his ideas have been proven correct. Rather, the invocation of his work is no longer intended to shock, but to mark a reemerging 

field of research. 

John Paul DiMoia, Princeton University (jdimoia@princeton.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country B 

Teaching the Atom: AERI and the Origins of the South Korean Nuclear Program, 1955-1959 

Following the Korean War (1950-1953), South Korea’s nascent scientific institutions and universities attempted to recover from the damage 

sustained during the previous three years. Under a commission from the Foreign Operations Administration, the University of 

Minnesota undertook an intensive program of technical assistance with Seoul National University, the nation’s premier institution of 

higher education, focusing initially on providing training in three critical areas: agriculture, engineering, and medicine. Amidst these difficult 

circumstances, Korean atomic scientists began to undertake a series of ambitious new projects, requesting access to technical training 

and American atomic energy facilities as early as 1955. A number of these researchers would subsequently attend the International 

School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Argonne National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Science. This 

paper thus examines the Korean-American scientific relationship by looking at atomic exchange during the four year period leading up 

to the establishment of the Atomic Energy Research Institute (AERI), a body comparable to the AEC. Established in the wake of 

Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” address of December 1953, AERI was designed to provide South Korea with a cheap, efficient source 

of energy, power which would subsequently drive the nation’s industrial and economic recovery. The collaborative relationship between 

American researchers and their Korean counterparts was complicated, however, by tensions centering on: (1) the proper approach to 

be taken toward nuclear power (research-based versus industrial), (2) the relationship between the construction of new facilities and the 

larger Korean university community, and (3) the type and length of training necessary to undertake an atomic energy program. If the 

successful start-up of South Korea’s first research reactor in 1962, along with its first commercial reactor in 1977, remains in part a legacy 

of this early period in the Korean-American collaborative relationship, South Korea has nevertheless pursued its own course in 

emphasizing this source of energy: nuclear power currently provides an estimated 39% of the nation’s energy needs at a time when 

many other countries have abandoned it and have instead sought alternative sources of power. 

Michael Eckert, Deutsches Museum (Munich) (m.eckert@deutsches-museum.de) 


The DPG and “Aryan Physics” 

After the war, the German Physical Society used the successful fight against “Aryan Physics” as an example of how the society had resisted 

National Socialism. This paper examines these claims critically, shedding light on the conflict over “Aryan Physics,” the conduct of 

the society under National Socialism, and the postwar apologia.

M. D. Eddy, Dibner Institute, MIT (mdeddy@mit.edu) 


Principles and Practice: Agricultural Chemistry in Scotland, 1770-1800 

The pre-eminent scientific institution of Enlightenment Scotland was the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). Its reputation was well 

established in continental Europe and its resident members were drawn from the university and from a highly talented group of literati 

who lived within traveling distance of the city. In the past, studies of RSE fellows have focused upon members whose research proved 

to be of use to the emerging chemical, anatomical, and geological sciences of Victorian Britain. Though such a historiography has 

increased our knowledge of figures like Joseph Black, William Cullen, James Hutton, and John Playfair, the process by which these 

philosophers and their contemporaries actually applied the experiments performed in Edinburgh?s laboratories to the improvement of 

Scotland’s economy has been relatively ignored. To remedy this situation, this paper addresses the career of James Anderson (1739- 

1808), one of Edinburgh’s chemically trained literati. Anderson was a founding member of the RSE and he nurtured a life-long interest 

in agricultural improvement. My essay will first address the theoretical principles that guided Anderson’s inquiry into agricultural 

chemistry. Like so many of Edinburgh’s bright adolescents, Anderson attended the University of Edinburgh, especially the chemistry 

lectures of William Cullen. Particular attention will be given to Anderson’s understanding of principle-based chemistry and its application 

to mineralogical classification. After his studies at Edinburgh, Anderson went on to apply his knowledge of chemistry to his own 

farm in Monkshill, Aberdeenshire and in several ‘fact finding’ tours of Scotland which were funded by the government. To explore 

how Anderson practically applied the chemistry he learned from Cullen, the second section looks at Anderson’s A Practical Treatise on 

Peat Moss (1794), An Essay on Quick-Lime, as a Cement and as a Manure (1799) and the highly popular An Account of the Present State of the 

Hebrides and Western Coasts of Scotland (1785). However, Anderson was not content with simply writing about chemical utility and the last 

section of this paper explores how he used this knowledge as a rhetorical backdrop for several treatises that he wrote on Scotland’s economy. 

To excavate his thoughts on these topics, I will look at Observations on the Effects of the Coal Duty (1792) and General View of the 

Agriculture? in Aberdeen (1794). I will conclude with a few remarks on how the theoretical and practical aspects of Anderson?s career 

point to a more nuanced view of the utilitarian interests of the RSE. 

Fa-ti Fan, State University of New York at Binghamton (ffan@binghamton.edu ) 


Natural History in Chinese-Western Encounter 

This paper compares two parallel and interrelated movements of scientific knowledge in China during the second half of the nineteenth 

century. On the one hand, it examines how Western naturalists and their Chinese associates carried out research into traditional Chinese 

lore about nature. They collaborated in interviewing Chinese people, translating Chinese literature, and other activities for the purpose 

of collecting scientific data. On the other hand, the paper looks at the efforts of Chinese and Western intellectuals to introduce Western 

natural history into China by translating Western scientific texts and establishing natural history museums. The paper focuses on two 

groups of historical actors: first, an intellectual network in Shanghai that comprised of Western missionaries and science advisors as well 

as Chinese officials and intellectuals; second, Chinese visitors to Europe who were interested in science, particularly natural history. By 

tracing the formation and transmission of scientific knowledge in cultural encounter, the paper provides a new perspective in understanding 

the history of natural history in global context. 

Philipp Felsch, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (felsch@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) 


Laboratory Landscapes. Angelo Mosso and the Mountains of Fatigue, 1875 - 1900 

Angelo Mosso, the Italian pioneer of physiological fatigue research and subsequent founder of a European science of work, presumably 

has never been inside of a factory. A skilled mountaineer, he conducted most of his research in the Alps – as did many French and 

German colleagues who were equally involved in the emergence of physiological thermodynamics (e.g. Adolf Fick, Auguste Chauveau, 

Hugo Kronecker, Nathan Zuntz). During the last decades of the 19th century, the Alpine “laboratory landscape” connected climbing 

professors with physiological recording instruments, sublime aesthetics, and bourgeois morals of arduousness, generating an experimental 

culture that shaped the epistemic design of future energetic physiology – such as the extension of “fatigue” from the muscles to sensory 

and psychic phenomena, and the high concern for individual physiognomies of exhaustion. Drawing largely upon Mosso’s unpublished 

notebooks and correspondence, my paper aims to show how the sublime and trembling moment on the summit – since romanticism 

a sought-after source for conventional ecstasy – was translated into graphic tracings of fatigue. 

Della D. Fenster, University of Richmond (dfenster@richmond.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country D 

Leonard Dickson: You Can Take the Man Out of Texas But not the Texas Out of the Man

The American mathematician Leonard Dickson played a key role in the consolidation and growth of the American mathematical 

research community in the opening decades of the twentieth century primarily from his position at the University of Chicago. His seminal 

publications and voluminous output (more than 300 manuscripts and 18 books over a forty-year career) reflected a dogged work 

ethic and fiercely independent personality that proved critical in the process that propelled American research-level mathematics forward 

as American science developed in general. This particular combination of qualities distinguished Dickson from his contemporaries 

in an energetic mathematical community that acquired not only momentum but also, increasingly, worldwide respect in the first four 

decades of the twentieth century. A native Texan, Dickson was a fascinating character in the history of mathematics, and the history 

of science more generally. This talk, highlighting material culled from The Center for American History in The University of Texas 

Archives, will emphasize how Dickson’s Texas heritage influenced his personality and his professional career. 

Mary Carmel Finley, University of California, San Diego (mfinley@ucsd.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country C 

All the Fish in the Sea: Science and the Development of Maximum Sustained Yield (MSY) 

In 1955, experts from 45 countries convened in Rome under the sponsorship of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United 

Nations for the International Technical Conference on the Living Resources of the Sea. Participants adopted Maximum Sustained Yield 

(MSY) as the goal of international fisheries management. Participants worked to develop a “scientific basis for a conservation plan,” 

but the goal and was deeply embedded in the social and political events of the 1950s, in which increasing the harvest from the sea was 

seen as a solution to problems of world hunger and world peace. 

Saul Fisher, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (sf@mellon.org) 

Saturday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Big Bend A, B, & C 

Gassendi and Puy-de-Dôme: Abandoning the “Regressus” for a Method of Hypothesis 

Does Pierre Gassendi employ the “regressus” method of the “Institutio Logica” in his own scientific practice? To answer this question 

I examine Gassendi’s most detailed reasoning about experimental episodes—his accounts of the barometric and vacuum-related experiments 

of 1648. This case study should show that his scientific practice conforms to the method of the “Institutio” just in case the reasoning 

of these accounts may be construed as plausible instances of ‘probabilist’ deductive brand of argument, and as comprising resolution 

or composition steps performed to realize discovery tasks. Yet the reasoning of these experimental accounts instead fits poorly 

with, or runs orthogonal to, the prescribed method of the “Institutio.” In Gassendi’s reconstruction of the Pascalian barometry 

experiment, the search for the middle term is rife with mystery—there is no univocal way to reconstruct the reasoning that underlies 

each account in syllogistic form. In addition, it is a daunting if not unfeasible task to find a judgment-realizing step that corresponds 

to the discovery-realizing step which is the primary feature of these experimental accounts. Even more importantly, these experimental 

analyses reveal a central methodological issue not as much as glanced upon in the “Institutio” perspective: what are the guidelines 

for hypothetical reasoning? Though Gassendi maintains a vision of science based on information from the senses, his own reasoning 

in these and other writings relies on hypothetical assumptions for which we have no direct sensory evidence. Indeed, he follows a familiar 

method of hypothesis, embracing substantive assumptions about the kinds of causes there may be, deducing their effects, and then 

explaining the data as effects of only such causes. (Notably, he assumes that only a corpuscularian-mechanical picture and an interparticulate 

void allow for the motion of bodies.) I briefly sketch Gassendi’s views—quite apart from his “regressus” method of the 

“Institutio” —as to what proper role such assumptions may have in advancing empirical inquiry, and how he believes we are to judge 

their merits and admissibility. 

Jed Foland, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (foland@history.umass.edu) 


Crossing Species: Buffon and the Science of Experimentation. 

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon spent a lifetime collecting and cataloging the known species of the world. In order to organize 

creatures, he developed a unique system of classification which differentiated species based on their ability to reproduce fertile offspring. 

To determine reproducibility, Buffon conducted inter-species breeding experiments. Buffon also undertook microscopic observations 

involving sperm as well as vivisection experiments in order to determine the process of fertilization. For these and other scientific 

endeavors, Buffon converted his own estate at Montbard into an extensive botanical garden and he transformed the Paris Jardin du 

Roi into an elaborate center for scientific investigation. This research documents Buffon’s unique methods of experimentation. Such an 

examination will explain the logic behind his theory of species degeneration as well as the canon of reproductive knowledge which 

would persist until Darwin’s theory of evolution. 

Brian Frehner, University of Oklahoma (bfrehner@ou.edu) 


Mapping Nature: The Role of Field Work in the Oklahoma Geological Survey 

The state of Oklahoma’s efforts to promote innovations in the science of petroleum geology in the early-twentieth century produced

some tangible benefits, but the state potentially retarded innovation when administrators overestimated their ability to map the natural 

world. The life of petroleum geologist Charles Gould illustrates how scientists who worked as government agents faced enormous pressure 

to produce information in order to meet the demands of business, government, and the scientific community. Each of these constituencies 

in Oklahoma often looked to Gould to provide them with information to locate oil. Gould began teaching geology at the 

University of Oklahoma in 1900, served as state geologist, and by 1920 had distinguished himself as the foremost expert of Southern 

Plains’ geology. Whether he succeeded in his mandate as a state official to provide the information these different constituencies needed 

is the central question this study attempts to answer. As James C. Scott has argued in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve 

the Human Condition Have Failed, many state efforts “to make a society legible” by mapping its people and resources often failed because 

they invested too much faith in science and technology. The state of Oklahoma often failed for reasons very similar to those described 

by Scott. As the first director of the Oklahoma Geological Survey, Gould undertook a massive effort to map the state’s resources. He 

taught a cadre of graduate students how to locate natural resources through field work, but he and his students many of whom he later 

employed did not attempt to incorporate the knowledge so-called practical oil men generated from their encounters with nature while 

“wildcatting” in the hills of Oklahoma. As Scott argues, state agents’ unwillingness to take seriously the “indispensable role of practical 

knowledge” and “informal processes” that governed local populations’ interactions with the natural world often accounted for the 

failure of many states to administer their domains. Although the Oklahoma Geological Survey was not a complete failure, it demonstrated 

a pattern very similar to that which undermined state authority in other societies. 

John P. Friesen, University of Leeds (phljpf@leeds.ac.uk) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom V 

Newtonian Natural Philosophy and the Ancients- Moderns Controversy at Christ Church Oxford 

In recent decades scholars have noted many Tory High-Church supporters of Newton in the early eighteenth century. What has yet to 

be adequately explored is the extent and nature of this support given fears that the Anglican Church was in danger from Whigs and 

Low-Churchmen and the connections between Newton and anti-Trinitarian heresy during this period. This presentation explains how 

Newton and his natural philosophy could be supported and promoted by opponents of the post 1688 revolutionary settlement in 

England. At Tory institutions such as Christ Church Oxford Newtonian natural philosophy was taught by David Gregory and John Keill 

as well as the physician John Freind. These men had close political, religious and cultural ties with Tory literary men like Francis 

Atterbury and William King as well as the satirists John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. These men took an active role 

in the ancients-moderns controversy defending ancient knowledge against large claims made for modern learning by the Whigs Richard 

Bentley and William Wotton. This presentation shows how Gregory, Keill and Friend argued that Newtonian natural philosophy represented 

a revival of ancient lost knowledge; Newton was thus not a vain modern whose theories surpassed those of previous thinkers, 

instead his system represented a restoration of ancient cosmological ideas. Tory High-Church natural philosophers could represent 

Newton as a champion for the ancients and as a modest pious natural philosopher, unlike many contemporary thinkers who used reason 

to undermine established authority, intellectual and divine. There is evidence that the teachings of Christ Church Newtonians penetrated 

the broader milieu of Tory High-Church literary wits. This may partly explain the few direct attacks on Newton by Tory satirists 

of science in the early eighteenth century despite the many Whig and Low-Church supporters of Newton during this period. 

Xaq Frohlich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (frohlich@mit.edu) 


Origins of the US “Sound Science” Rationale and its Confrontation with Europe’s “Precautionary Principle” Over GM Foods 

By the late 1990s, policy debates over genetically modified (GM) foods became the center of international tensions over trade, characterized 

by Europe’s generally more critical attitude towards biotechnology than that of the US. As European nations began to impose 

trade-barriers on the unpopular products, disputes between US and European government officials spilled over into international trade 

arenas, culminating in the opposing rationales of the US’s “sound science” and Europe’s “precautionary principle.” While many attribute 

the standoff to irreconcilable cultural differences, that Europeans were “risk-averse” and Americans “risk-prone”, one had only to 

look to the 1970s NIH moratorium on recombinant DNA research to find the roles reversed, with US scientists responding to uncertain 

risks with “undue” precaution. How did such a policy reversal in the US regarding genetically modified organisms come about? 

This paper examines four phenomena, which led to a shift in the US in the intervening years from precautionary concern over GMOs 

to an enthusiasm backed by “sound science”: 1) a shift in the political atmosphere surrounding scientific research in general, from the 

1970s anti-war distrust to a 1980s global economic technology imperative, 2) in the wake of the rDNA debates, lingering frustrations 

and sensitivities of US scientists and officials regarding the encroachment of public debacle into scientific controversies, 3) the continued 

lack of observed hazards—despite increasing use and release—that became the de facto “evidence” for the safety of rDNA products, 

and 4) the post-Asilomar acceptance of the molecular characterization of rDNA products as “substantially equivalent,” despite 

remaining uncertainty. Meanwhile, I will discuss how political movements in Europe took an opposite path regarding genetic technologies, 

food safety, agriculture and the environment, resulting in the standoff with the US in the 1990s. While it is unclear whether the 

current GM food moratorium in Europe will follow the path of the 1970s US rDNA moratorium and give way to technological imperatives, 

the similarities of the two debates raise questions as to the extent to which such controversies are caused by transitory social and 

economic conditions rather than intractable cultural differences. 

Bernd Gausemeier, MPG-Forschungsprogramm (gausemeier@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom II 

Science or Politics?: Nazi Racial Biology, ‘Pure Genetics’ and the Rockefeller Foundation Connection 

Unitl the mid 1930s, eugenics was viewed as an international movement adhered to by renowned biomedical scientists worldwide. The 

experience of National Socialist “racial policy,” however, challenged the claims that eugenics was a project based merely on scientific 

insights. This paper will discuss how the boundaries between the scientific and politcial sphere were redefined in a situation of extreme 

political dension during the early years of the Third Reich by examining the role of the Rockefeller Foundation. Prior to 1933, the 

Foundation unerwrote projects directly related to German eugenics. After the “Nazi seizure of power,” however, the foundation was 

under pressure to question its German support. Yet the Foundation had difficulties rejecting the new German regime outright, since it 

defined itself as a strictly non-political organization. Interestingly, this tension had repercussions on German science, as the Foundation 

restricted its financial support to German scientists regarded as “untainted” with “racial questions.” As a result,the Foundation regarded 

‘pure geneticists” as better representatives of German science than their more overtly politicized biomedical counterparts. For the 

Nazi regime, the international contacts of its most esteemed “pure geneticists” had an inestimable value in a double sense: they were 

effective “goodwill ambassadors,” and they were living proof that German genetics, lauded as the basis for racial policy under the swastika, 

was not a domain of quacks. 

Monika Gisler, University of Basel/University of California, Los Angeles (gisler@sed.ethz.ch) 


Interpereting Earthquakes in 18th Century Protestant Switzerland: Between Science and Theology 

The century of Enlightenment was devoted to the idea of a harmonious world designed by God. In this concept, no space was left for 

a perception of a natural world with an arbitrary fate. Everything had to be put in order, and was classified with the intention of referring 

to the vision of a harmonious world and wise order. This world was described as teleologically structured, according to the wise 

plan of God. Therein the arbitrary must have a purpose on a higher level, the negative must be positive, the useless must serve a use. 

The teleology of the negative was successful, when nature itself let loose its threats. Natural disasters had thus to be explained, to integrate 

them in the new concept. After having been understood and rationalized, they could be integrated into the optimistic vision of a 

“good world”. In my paper I will present some endeavors to explain earthquakes by 18th century protestant naturalists in Switzerland. 

Their interpretations can be read as attempts to decipher God in nature: if the intentions of God in processes and rules of nature 

became understandable with the help of science, God’s will could be calculated. Simultaneously, this would justify scientific research – 

it could no longer be considered an invasion into the sphere of God. Their considerations dealt with patterns of both reason and belief. 

This had long been ignored or rejected as apologetic by a scientific history that focused first if all on the modernity of these researchers. 

In my paper I tend to speak of a conceptualized history of science that involves the social and cultural exogenous factors of knowledge-production 

and scientific development. As a consequence, the dialectic production of scientific knowledge with the respective religious 

background during the 18th century may no longer be read as anti-modernized or pre-scientific. 

Anne Katrine Gjerløff, Department of History, University of Copenhagen (akg@hum.ku.dk) 


Adventures of the Ape: Popularizations of Paleoanthropology in Denmark in the 20th Century 

Paleoanthropology is among the most popular and popularized natural sciences as the amount of literature testifies. This paper presents 

the results of a comprehensive study of the literature on the evolution of man in Denmark in the 20th century, including schoolbooks, 

monographs, fiction, museum-catalogues and popular science magazines. The study reveals how the paleoanthropological knowledge 

enters society and is altered according to the genres of popularization, the public attitude to the subject and the international scientific 

developements and it allows further conclusions about the relationship between science, society and the construction of knowledge 

as well as it demonstrates the various connections between theories of human evolution and the selfconcept of modern man. 

Sander Gliboff, Indiana University (sgliboff@indiana.edu) 


Ernst Haeckel and the Mechanical Causes of Ontogeny 

Despite his prominence as a Darwinian in the nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel was depicted in the early twentieth as an anachronism. 

The pioneering historian of biology Erik Nordenskïold, for example, said he had revived an obsolescent romanticism in 1866 and clung 

to it dogmatically for over half a century thereafter. Yet Haeckel was anything but unresponsive to scientific developments after 1866. 

In particular, Haeckel’s exchanges with embryologist Wilhelm His in the 1870s, over the nature of “mechanistic” causes in development 

and the validity of historical inference and explanation, had a lasting effect on his thinking. The experience colored Haeckel’s outlook 

on later advances in biology, in which he perceived renewed threats of ahistorical thinking like that of His. This helps explain his negative 

assessments of Weismann’s neo-Darwinism, Roux’s Entwicklungsmechanik, and even Mendelism and mutatonism—assessments 

that in turn made him look like an obstacle to progress in some of the first histories of modern biology. 

Daniel Goldstein, University of California, Davis (dgoldstein@ucdavis.edu)


Great Expectations: The Intellectual Context for State Geological and Natural History Surveys in Antebellum America 

By 1860, 30 of the 33 states in the Union had established geological surveys. In order to understand why so many states regarded inventories 

of their flora, fauna, and minerals as a necessary government function we need to remember that antebellum Americans believed 

that they lived first, in a world designed and created by a benevolent deity and second, in a nation uniquely favored by that God. Survey 

supporters argued, logically in this context, that since God wished the United States to prosper and expand, He ensured that the 

resources that Americans would need were placed where they would be needed. It was thus incumbent on each state to identify the 

resources that would set it on its unique path to preordained prosperity. This paper explores the internal logic of this belief system and 

explains how it led to the establishment of the state surveys. It also shows how this activity was given added impetus by other contemporaneous 

movements—especially the annexation of Indian lands. Opponents of Indian territorial sovereignty argued that they were 

morally justified in taking the land because Indians were not using it as God intended. Surveys would ensure that white Americans fully 

(and in this context) morally exploited their divinely designed environment. 

Lynn Gorchov, Oberlin College (lynn.gorchov@oberlin.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country C 

Dismissing the Experts: The 1950 Senate Sex Perversion Hearings 

While most historians have characterized the 1950s as a period when social scientists and psychiatrists were ascendant in American culture, 

the 1950 U.S. Senate hearings on “The Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government” demonstrate the 

relative ineffectuality of social scientific and psychiatric expertise in influencing federal policy on sexuality. My paper shows how testimony 

by intelligence officials and police vice squad detectives, not the recently published findings of Alfred Kinsey or the testimony of 

psychiatrists, led the federal government to ban homosexuals from Civil Service employment. 

Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University (mgordin@princeton.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country A 

The Weekday Chemist: Music, Science, Training, and Aleksandr Borodin 

Ever since the days of George Sarton, Aleksandr Borodin (1833-1887) has been elusive prey for historians of science. Educated at the 

Medico-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg as a physician and then sent abroad to Heidelberg for postdoctoral work in chemistry, he 

was employed from his return in 1862 until his death at his alma mater as professor of organic chemistry. His initially promising experimental 

researches soon dribbled to next to nothing by the early 1870s, and aside from some brief and not very heated (by Russian standards) 

priority altercations with August Kekulé and Adolphe Wurtz, he leaves a small but significant mark on the history of Russian 

chemistry. Yet there is more secondary literature on Aleksandr Borodin than on almost any other Imperial Russian chemist. For aside 

from his organic chemistry, Borodin also spent his time composing music, much of it quite famous (the opera “Prince Igor,” the symphonic 

poem “The Steppes of Central Asia,” his Second Symphony, and his Second String Quartet being the most prominent). But 

even here his productivity was low and there are roughly as many musical compositions to rival his meager number of chemical works. 

Borodin has attracted so much attention because he represents the “holy grail” of a scientist who transcended C. P. Snow’s “two cultures,” 

emerging in the end as one of the most famous Russian composers of any period. Much of the voluminous literature on 

Borodin — dating from some highly influential obituaries — focuses on Borodin as plagued by a problem of “dual vocation”: he was 

either “truly” a musician distracted by chemistry, or “truly” a chemist distracted by music. Drawing upon Borodin’s extensive and largely 

underutilized correspondence, this paper argues that the formulation of “dual vocation” does not capture the parallels and anti-parallels 

between Borodin’s music and his science. Instead of essentializing a concept of “career,” the crux of the connection between 

music and science for Borodin centered on the issue of how to appropriately “train” specialists for a modernizing Russia. 

Pamela Gossin, University of Texas, Dallas (psgossin@utdallas.edu) 


Literary History of Astronomy: Thomas Hardy’s Personal Construct Cosmology 

Interdisciplinary scholars such as Kathyrn Neeley have identified and described the multifarious formal and generic categories in which 

the historiography of science participates, among them: comprehensive history, monumental encyclopedic history, progress narratives, 

representative history, dramatic history, biographical and intellectual history. Such concerns, regrettably, rarely attract the direct focus 

of their primary authors’ attentions. Whether standing upon the hefty shoulders of traditionally formulated history of science or 

responding (consciously or subconsciously) to the internalized conventions and rhetorical structures of “Isis” or JHA style, today’s professional 

historians of science, in general, and historians of astronomy, in particular, know their historiography when they see it. In nineteenth-century 

Britain, the formal expectations for histories of astronomy and cosmology were still in the process of being constructed 

and drew upon a wide variety of discursive models, including: spoken eulogies, memorials in poetry and prose, “great men of science” 

hagiographies, triumphant histories of the empire, academic and popular lectures, critical essays, verse medleys, drama, and the 

historical, realist and naturalist novel. Read individually and collectively, Thomas Hardy’s novels synthesize the technical content, rhetoric, 

themes, and tropes he found in natural histories, popularizations of astronomy and other proto-histories of science, with the style 

and content of early works of anthropology, archaeology, comparative mythology, and classical and contemporary literary texts. From

these diverse materials, Hardy constructed for his readership a complex new cosmological myth that expressed his perception of the 

personal, social, and philosophical implications of his culture’s “place in the universe.” Hardy’s “novel” universe offers useful insights 

into the formal possibilities of a more overtly literary history of astronomy that richly resonate with current trends expressed by the 

publication of such works as Dava Sobel’s Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, as well as Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. 

Robert Goulding, University of Notre Dame (Goulding.2@nd.edu) 


How can Alexandria be Brought to Oxford? Henry Savile’s History of Mathematics and Institutional Reform. 

Henry Savile’s 1570 lectures at Oxford on the Almagest were prefaced by a vastly detailed history of mathematics and astronomy, stretching 

from Adam to Ptolemy himself. Savile’s principal (though unacknowledged) source for his history was Petrus Ramus’s Prooemium 

mathematicum of 1567, which he supplemented by his own wide reading and study of manuscripts he found in Oxford. Although indebted 

to Ramus, Savile’s understanding of the nature and purpose of the sciences is entirely opposed to that of the French educator. I 

examine how Savile reconstrued Ramus’s historical researches in order to advance his own theoretical and educational goals. 

Joel Hagen, Radford University (jhagen@runet.edu) 


Fossil Proteins, Chemical Paleogenetics, and the Early Development of Molecular Systematics 

During the early 1960s Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and his younger colleague Emile Zuckerkandl proposed a field of study that they 

dubbed “chemical paleogenetics.” This new field would supplement, and in some cases supplant, traditional paleontology by bringing 

the rigorous tools of biochemistry to bear on the study of extinct life forms. It would also require advanced methods drawn from computer 

science and computational biology to test amino acid sequences for homology, construct hypothetical phylogenetic trees, and evaluate 

alternative trees statistically. Although the term “paleogenetics” didn’t catch on, the analogy between proteins and fossils was widely 

employed during the early years of molecular evolution and molecular systematics. By reconstructing phylogenies of proteins and 

the organisms that possessed them, practitioners hoped to infer the structure and function of ancestral molecules. This, they hoped, 

would lead to a better understanding of extinct species and might even have practical applications for medicine. This paper examines 

the tension between traditional natural history and paleogenetics during the 1960s. It explores the promises and limitations of the analogy 

between fossils and macromolecules, the methods of representing phylogenetic relationships among related proteins, methods of 

statistically evaluating alternative phylogenetic hypotheses, and the implications of these methods for the early development of what has 

become a burgeoning field of molecular systematics. 

Alexander J. Hahn, University of Notre Dame (hahn.1@nd.edu) 


Discorsi and Experiment in Conflict: Galileo’s Folio 116v and his Resolution of the Mirandum Paradox 

It is generally accepted that the time in Padua from 1604 to 1610 is the primary period of formation of Galileo’s final account of 

motion. Leaving behind his earlier attempts (still based on the concept of impetus and its consequences), he develops the axiomatic theory 

of uniformly accelerated motion that would comprise the discussions of the third and fourth days of the “Discors” published in 

1638. With this account Galileo establishes himself as the discoverer of some of the fundamental facts and insights of what would 

later become the classical theory of motion in the hands of Newton. In particular, Galileo realizes that horizontal motion is conserved, 

elevates uniformly accelerated motion to a status of central importance, conceptualizes it as an amalgam of a horizontal and a vertical 

component, and derives the parabolic trajectory (at least in the case of a horizontal projection). A matter of considerable discussion by 

historians of science is the role that experiments played in Galileo’s process of the discovery and confirmation of his insights. Some 

historians have asserted that Galileo generally trusts the conclusion of a proof of a proof that resides within a consistent theoretical 

framework - more than an outcome of an experiment that deviates from such a conclusion. It is the primary purpose of the proposed 

paper to illustrate this point with a comparative study of Galileo’s folio 116v and the “Mirandum Paradox.” For a related article, see 

Hahn, Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 56 (2002), 339-361. 

Michael Cory Halliburton, Independent Scholar (mhallibu@midsouth.rr.com) 


Paul Kammerer, Immortal Suicide 

While alive, Paul Kammerer was a controversial figure. Since his suicide in 1926, he has remained controversial and lived on as a symbol—as 

one of the undead in other people’s ideological wars. Arthur Koestler used Kammerer’s Neo-Lamarckianism as an example of 

the methods that materialistic Darwinists would use to destroy their enemies. Creationists have also found a niche for Kammerer in 

their contemporary struggle against everything evolutionary: Kammerer’s failure proves the impossibility of any alternatives to 

Darwinian evolution. However, the case of Kammerer still has historical interest. The morphologists at the University of Vienna and 

Hans Przibram’s “Vivarium” in the Prater still had their evolutionary options open. In the early years of the twentieth century anything

was possible. The transformation of society was possible. The transcendence of the human race was still possible. The agency of 

nature, the social and political struggles at the University of Vienna, and the culture of the superman set the stage for the play of the 

real and the symbolic in Kammerer’s story. Kammerer’s fraudulent scientific work marks the end of an era of open possibilities and the 

ascendance of the evolutionary synthesis and different, equally frightening visions of the human future. 

Jacob Darwin Hamblin, California State University, Long Beach (jdhamb@yahoo.com) 


Scientific Opportunity or Political Opportunism? American Oceanographers, UNESCO, and Cooperation in Asia, 1950-1970 

Oceanography has a reputation for having been dominated by Scandinavians, northern Europeans, and North Americans. Yet some of 

the largest oceanographic projects ever undertaken (such as the International Indian Ocean Expedition) were cooperative ones that 

expressly enrolled the participation of Asian countries. There were several reasons for this shift in emphasis in the 1950s and 1960s. 

One was that Americans sought to link cooperative marine science to their government’s geopolitical goals after the Second World War, 

especially regarding Japan. Also, aid to the developing world was a hallmark of UNESCO’s plan for oceanography, which developed in 

coordination not only with scientific efforts but with American and British technical assistance programs. Third, scientists the world 

over hoped to bolster financial support for their own work by making economic promises to the huge populations in Asia in need of 

alternative protein sources. Last, both the Soviet Union and the United States competed for Asian partners in cooperative scientific 

research, to forge political ties and to bolster claims for international scientific leadership. This paper examines the evolving obsession 

with Asia by American oceanographers and by their counterparts in UNESCO. It argues that Asia became a crucial aspect of 

Americans’ strategy of patronage after the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Rather than focus on East-West cooperation, oceanographers 

turned toward “development science,” a concept touted by officials the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. But actual cooperation 

with scientists in Asia proved far more challenging and problematic than they anticipated, and American and British scientists paid a 

high price for their opportunism. Drawn from my forthcoming book, Disciples of Marine Science , this paper outlines the basic features 

of American oceanographers’ use of international cooperation to promote their discipline, and illustrates the crucial role played by Asia. 

Joy Harvey, Independent Scholar (jharvey368@aol.com) 


Rethinking French Darwinism 

While my prior research on the reception of Darwinism in France focused on the evolutionary debates held within the Société 

d’Anthropologie de Paris and Darwin’s first French translator, Clémence Royer who participated in those debates in the 1870s, I have 

recently re-examined the correspondence of French scientists with Darwin. The letters ranged from discussion on scientific questions 

that included fossil and anatomical evidence for evolution to questions of hybridity in plants and animals. Among these correspondents 

were Albert Gaudry, Paul Broca, Charles Naudin, Armand de Quatrefages, Gaston Saporta, Charles Martins and Darwin’s translators, 

Clémence Royer, J-J Moulinié and Edouard Barbier. The use of French science in Darwin’s editions of Origin, Variation , Descent of Man, 

Expression of the Emotions, as well as in his botanical books, suggests another perspective on the interaction between Darwin and his 

French correspondents. This paper will explore reasons why Darwin continued to cultivate French science and why and how French 

scientists found Darwinian science useful in their scientific research and in their popular writings. 

Albrecht Heeffer, Ghent University (albrecht.heeffer@ugent.be) 


Récréation Mathématiques (1624): A Study on the Authorship, Sources and Influence. 

In 1624 a small octavo was published in the French university town Pont-à-Mousson, for the first time using the term ‘recreational mathematics’ 

in the title. This work is pivotal for the seventeenth-century history of science and mathematics as it brings together two sixteenth-century 

traditions, mercantile arithmetic and natural magic, and creates two new ones: recreational mathematics and popular science. 

Not that so many new ideas were developed in this book. Several of the recreational problems treated, trace back to Babylonian, 

Greek and Hindu sources and the infatuation with mechanical contrivances dates from Hero of Alexandria. But the fact that the book 

stands on the crossroad of traditions, its popularity with the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century and its complex history 

makes it a grateful subject for study. I will clarify some of the complexities about the numerous editions and confusing claims about its 

authorship. In order to demonstrate how feeble the support for the authorship of Jean Leurechon is, I will advance a different theory 

which can be better argumented. Then we trace the original sources of the author tothe magical tradition and investigate the influence 

it had in the early seventeenth century. 

Anna Henchman, Society of Fellows, Harvard University (henchman@fas.harvard.edu) 


To See What I See: Thomas De Quincey and the Orion Nebula

Thomas De Quincey’s 1846 essay “The Systems of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” celebrates the construction 

of far and away the largest telescope in the world at that time a 56-foot long telescope with a six-foot wide mirror designed to study 

nebulae. Lord Rosse, who built the telescope, claimed (mistakenly, it would turn out) that the telescope had enabled him to “resolve” 

the Orion nebula. With this advance in telescopy, De Quincey writes, the previously defiant nebula has become famous “for the submission 

with which it has begun to render up its secrets to the all-conquering telescope.” And yet the “secrets” of the Orion nebula 

would prove extremely hard to interpret. De Quincey’s essay foregrounds these interpretive problems—his own rhapsody on the Orion 

nebula uses John Herschel’s illustration as a springboard for a fanciful rant on the nebula as celestial monster. This paper places De 

Quincey’s literary representation of the nebula in the context of those of contemporary astronomers Herschel, Lord Rosse and John 

Pringle Nichol—and shows that their representational strategies are more continuous than one might imagine. Any representation of 

the nebula involves an unwieldy negotiation between what the observer half-perceives and what he half-creates. At a moment before 

astronomers had begun to photograph nebulae, the goal of getting a reader or a viewer “to see what I see” involved a set of representational 

choices with complicated implications in terms of negotiating between subjective and objective knowledge, imagination and perceptual 

accuracy. How could such observations and illustrations be weighed against one another as “evidence” for or against the nebular 

hypothesis? At one end of the spectrum is William Herschel, who proposes that “Seeing is in some respects an art that must be 

learnt” and that he himself has acquired “a certain dexterity” by “practicing to see.” At the other end is De Quincey who constantly disorients 

his reader and indulges the arbitrary impressions of a particular point of view at a particular moment in time, by a particular 

consciousness. In the process, he suggests that the very ideal of objective knowledge depends on a stable sense of bodily orientation 

that the nineteenth-century universe disrupts. The debates around the status of the nebula mark an uncomfortable transition between 

a moment in which the astronomer’s knowledge was relied upon in fashioning illustrations and a later period in which mechanical objectivity 

became the preferred representational mode. 

Dieter Hoffmann, Max Planck Institute for History of Science (dh@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) 


The “Ramsauer Era” and the Self-Mobilization of the DPG 

Under the auspices of Carl Ramsauer as the chairman of the the German Physical Society (DPG) - I would even like to speak of the 

“Ramsauer Era” - it becomes clear that under his auspices DPG emerged from its marginal existence and intervened ever more actively 

in the socio-political processes of the Third Reich. While doing so, Ramsauer used his position as an industrial physicist and his good 

connections to military circles in order to forge an alliance with the military-industrial complex of Nazi Germany. The position of the 

DPG as well as its prestige and influence profited greatly and lastingly from this alliance, but simultaneously the society was transformed 

into a functioning institution of scientific specialists serving the NS state loyally and effectively, although not in any case enthusiastically. 

In this way the society lost its political innocence - if the DPG had have had it ever - since this alliance established various structures 

of collaboration with the political power centers. 

Ute Holl, Bauhaus-University Weimar (uteholl@medien.uni-weimar.de) 


Science and Avantguarde. Dziga Vertov’s Filmwork and the Techniques of Observing in Russian Reflexology 

The work of avantgarde filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1898-1954) goes back to his studies with the famous founder of Russian 

Psychoreflexology, Vladimir Bekhterev. Bekhterev, coming from the German (Flechsig) and French (Charcot) schools of neurology, 

stands in the tradition of objective psychology, i.e. a strict observation of the physiological, outer symptoms of nervous reactions and 

behavior. Without giving it much considerance as a medium, their evidence was largely based on visual imaging techniques. In my paper 

I want to trace back the history of chrono-photographic and filmic techniques in neurology and psychology. I will give examples of 

how time and space were constructed in the scientific research. I argue that the notion of behavior, especially in Russian history, relies 

on the employment of film and filmic techniques in the epistemological process. Dziga Vertov then takes this back into art as a social 

process. To prove this I will show excerpts of films by Vertov and of older material from the psychological and psychiatric laboratories. 

Giora Hon, University of Haifa (hon@research.haifa.ac.il) 


Living Extremely Flat: The Status of Errors in Experimental Studies of Biological Systems 

John von Neumann (1903–1957) paid much attention to the phenomenon of error in his studies of large scale computing machines 

and automata. Important issues of reliability were after all at stake: success or failure of expensive technological inventions was hanging 

in the balance. These machines and software schemes were partly conceived with a view to imitating features of living systems. 

Drawing on the studies of von Neumann, I shall present a comparative, general analysis of error in the inanimate realm and in living 

systems. An inherent feature of the epistemological phenomenon of error is the divergence from a given standard. Such discrepancy 

may arise because of innumerable reasons, but its detection is due invariably to evaluative procedures against that standard. Crucial then 

for the detection of error and its characterization in experimentation is the presence of a standard against which a divergence is discerned 

and assessed. In this paper I examine the nature of errors in biological systems when they interact with the constraints of experimental 

setups as distinct from errors that arise in physical, inanimate system. Von Neumann’s analysis of the problem of error in 

machines that are designed to simulate life processes, provides an instructive background against which errors that arise in experimenting 

on biological systems may be fruitfully studied. I seek to demonstrate that such errors may not have clear identification since the

standard from which they are supposed to diverge is entirely missing. 

Minghui Hu, University of Chicago (mhu@uchicago.edu) 


Measuring the Cosmos: Tension between Confucian Cosmology and Jesuit Cosmography 

If an informed literatus of mid-eighteenth century China had been asked to describe Jesuit astronomy, he probably would have begun 

to suggest that the Jesuit science focused exclusively on the measures of the cosmos (cetian ??). The measures of the cosmos constituted 

the core of Qing imperial calendar, and the precision measures in the imperial calendar served to symbolize the Qing state power. 

The Manchu conquest of Ming China consequently led to the formation of state orthodoxy within which the Manchu monarchs shared 

his legitimacy with the intellectual and cultural elites in China. How, or to what extent, did the divinatory and ritualistic elements remain 

in the Qing state cosmology? How did these elements hang together with mathematical and observational astronomy that were so crucial 

in the demonstration of the Qing court prowess in precision measures? How did the literati and officials at court put Confucian 

cosmology and Jesuit cosmography together in the state orthodoxy? 

Patti Wilger Hunter, Westmont College (phunter@westmont.edu) 


Foundations of Statistics in American Textbooks: Probability and Pedagogy in Historical Context 

The pages of journals dealing with statistics education have contained in recent years a number of discussions about the most effective 

ways to treat the subject of probability in introductory statistics courses. The conversation about the role of probability and the form 

it should take in statistics courses is not a recent phenomenon, but has been going on since the introduction of statistical inference in 

the early decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, prominent members of the statistics community made important contributions 

to that conversation, contributions shaped significantly by statisticians’ concerns about their place in the broader scientific community. 

This paper will analyze the treatment of probability in several American statistics textbooks from the 1920s through the 1940s. It will 

show that the emergence and development of the American statistics community and its concerns about its place in the larger academic 

and scientific world influenced the approaches statisticians took to presenting the ideas of probability. 

Yoshiko Iizuka, Rissho University (hazime@ris.ac.jp) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Hill Country D 

Birth Technology and Gender Problems in Recent Japan 

In Japan, the first test tube baby was born in 1983 and a baby’s sex selection birth was performed in 1985. Before these birth technologies 

had popularized, medical accident in the field of obstetrics and gynecology had occurred in 1980. It gave serious social impact for 

Japanese society. It was a matter that normal uterus and/or ovary were removed surgically in the private hospital. In the present study, 

we surveyed the press comments of the matter chronologically in relation to the gender problem and birth technology. As a result, 

stereotyped comments that happiness for females are conception, child birth and child care appeared in 1980’s. However, reproductive 

health and rights problem has been popularizing since 1990’s. Also, birth technology has well developed. And bioethical issues occurred. 

Joel Isaac, Trinity College, University of Cambridge (jti20@cam.ac.uk) 


The Education of a “Scientific Philosopher”: W. V. Quine and the Analytic Turn in American Philosophy, 1926-1940 

For half a century, until his death in December 2000, Willard Van Orman Quine was considered by his peers to be the most important 

and influential of living philosophers. At the forefront of developments in logical empiricism and logical positivism, Quine helped to 

establish analytic philosophy in the United States, where it has flourished since the 1950s. This paper discusses the circumstances of 

Quine’s education in the late 1920s and 1930s, and the unique conceptions of scientific knowledge it engendered, namely, holism and a 

“naturalist” epistemology. By following Quine through Oberlin College, graduate school at Harvard, a year of instruction in Europe, 

and, finally, a junior fellowship at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, it is argued that we can see the basic tenets of Quine’s mature thought 

set in as early as his sophomore year at Oberlin. Significantly, however, Quine did not develop these tenets explicitly until the later 1930s, 

electing instead to concentrate on elaborating for an American audience the views of his mentor Rudolf Carnap, “even though” his nascent 

conceptions of scientific knowledge induced profound misgivings about Carnap’s approach. It is contended that Quine elected to 

soft-peddle his own convictions in favour of a strong body of European philosophy in order to carve out a space for his own project 

within the American philosophical tradition. In common with figures in other disciplines in mid-twentieth century America, Quine 

exploited a traditional deference to European arts and sciences to effect a turn towards a new set of concepts and problems in the philosophy 

of science and the science of philosophy. 

Kenji Ito, The University of Tokyo (kenjiito@post.harvard.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country B

Gender and Physics in Japan around WWII: Toshiko Yuasa and her Emigration to France 

Both the physics community and Japanese society in the 20th century are not well-known for their gender sensitivity. One could expect 

the worst when these two are combined. This paper examines how gender affected one’s career in physics in Japan by focusing on 

Toshiko Yuasa. Yuasa’s case is of particular interest, because not only she was Japan’s first significant female physicist, but also her career 

seems to require a historically informed way of understanding how gender functioned in physics in Japan. Yuasa was an atomic physicist 

trained by Frédéric Joliot-Curie before World War II. Although she returned to Japan just before the war ended, she eventually 

migrated to France in 1949 and died there. Yuasa’s case, therefore, does not disappoint our expectation: Physics in Japan was totally 

unprepared to have a female constituent, and Yuasa had to go to France first for training and then to have a permanent job. Japan’s sexism 

alone, however, does not do justice to the complexity of Yuasa’s case. Whereas repelled by rampant sexism in postwar Japan, she 

was nevertheless curiously hostile to what she conceived as American feminism in the postwar era. Although she could not build a career 

in Japan and to be naturalized in France would have been easy and advantageous to her, she never abandoned her Japanese nationality 

or Japanese cultural practices like tradition poetry. I argue that Yuasa was not simply a refuge from gender discrimination. Yuasa’s decisions 

to become a physicist and to leave for France twice owed much to her background and the kind of femininity encouraged then. 

Her being a woman in a sexist society and ensuing circumstances shaped in her a particular set of values and a certain vision of physics. 

These motivated her to become a physicist and encouraged to go to France. Upon her return to Japan, however, her vision of physics, 

in addition to her being a woman, alienated her from other Japanese physicists and forced her to leave for France again. Thus, although 

Japan’s gender bias caused Yuasa’s emigration to France, it occurred in a more complex and contextual way than it appears. 

Konstantin Ivanov, Tula State Pedagogic University (Konstantine@yandex.ru) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country A 

The First Steps of Astrophysics in the USSR: Revolutionary Policies in Science and Disciplinary Boundaries 

At the beginning of the 20th century, “astrophysics” was a relatively new term in the discourse of science. The traditional discipline of 

astronomy and its long established practices were closely linked to naval, geodesic and topographical needs of the military and the state. 

Several technological inventions and new instruments at the end of the 19th century started challenging the existing astronomical practices, 

creating internal tension within the professional community and its institutions. In Russia, the establishment of the new boundary 

between traditional astronomy and astrophysics occurred in the context of radical revolutionary reforms in the country’s scientific 

infrastructure during the 1920s. The paper analyzes this process of discipline creation and institutional building in the case of the proposed 

Chief Russian Astrophysical Observatory, approved by the Commissariat of Enlightenment in 1919. The initiative came mostly 

from astronomers such as V. G. Fesenkov, who were in opposition to the existing hierarchy and order in astronomy, represented by the 

Pulkovo Observatory. After several reorganizations, failures and starts, the proposed disciplinary reform resulted in the establishment 

of the Russian Astrophysical Institute, subsequently the Shternberg Institute of Astronomy. The history and transformations of the 

new disciplinary field reflected the changing dynamics in the cultural climate for innovation and the relative authority of experts and 

politicians in revolutionary Russia. 

Anja Skaar Jacobsen, Department of Mathematics and Physics, Roskilde University, Denmark (skaar@ruc.dk) 


The Role of Marxist Ideology in Léon Rosenfeld’s Defence of Complementarity in the 1950s 

The Belgian born physicist Léon Rosenfeld (1904–1974) has been called “the clarifier” of Niels Bohr’s complementarity interpretation 

of quantum mechanics. He had a unique connection to Bohr as his closest assistant from 1930 and took part in the development of the 

so-called Copenhagen interpretation during its formative years. Rosenfeld has also been called “the square root of Trotsky times Bohr” 

by his friend the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, referring to Rosenfeld’s loyalty to Bohr and the fact that he was a sworn Marxist. In the 1950s 

a strife about the interpretation of quantum mechanics took place in the physics community in which the complementarity interpretation 

was questioned from the perspective of Marxist philosophy among other things. In order to shed more light on the groupings 

among Marxism-inspired physicists as well as on the philosophically heterogeneous group of adherents of the Copenhagen interpretation, 

this paper investigates what role Marxist ideology and philosophy played in Rosenfeld’s fierce defence of complementarity in the 

1950s. 

Derek Jensen, Brigham Young University (derek_jensen@byu.edu) 


The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds in Seventeenth-Danzig: Abraham von Franckenberg’s Oculus Sidereus 

Karl Guthke has recently made the claim that “in Germany the wars of religion delayed the assimilation of the new science, and the 

tendency to ignore the new worlds remained the norm in German literature and philosophy right up to the early eighteenth century.” 

(The Last Frontier, 113). While this may have been the case for most of the German-speaking area of Europe, the existence of Abraham 

von Franckenberg’s “Oculus Sidereus” printed in the Prussian port Danzig in 1644 provides a strong counterexample to Dr. Guthke’s 

general claim. In this paper, I will address examples of engagement with the idea of plurality of worlds that existed in seventeenth-century 

German literature and philosophy, and specifically, I will address the social and cultural conditions that existed in mid-century 

Danzig that made it a place for the publication of Oculus Sidereus. Conditions included a healthy astronomical community that included 

the activities of Johannes Hevelius, printers willing to publish Franckenberg’s ideas and an audience interested in the science of the

stars. Franckenberg’s book had a diverse readership that included the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. As an alternative to the recent thesis 

of Ingrid Rowland that Kircher wrote his own speculations of the plurality of worlds in his book Itinerarium exstaticum based on readings 

of Giordano Bruno, I will suggest that the substance of Franckenberg’s Oculus Sidereus, which contained a detailed summary of 

Bruno’s poem “De Immenso et Innumerabilibus” could have just as likely served Kircher as source material. 

Andrew Jewett, Yale University (andrew.jewett@yale.edu) 


American Scientists and the International Reconstruction Debate 

As scholars such as Peter J. Kuznick and Elizabeth Hodes have shown, American scientists contributed prominently to the pre-1941 discussion 

of the proper response to European fascism, and later drove the debate over the control and uses of nuclear energy after the 

war’s end in 1945. This paper provides a bridge between these two “scientists’ movements” by showing that American scientists participated 

in a vigorous public discourse on global reconstruction that took place between about 1942 and 1947. While many of the nation’s 

researchers were ensconced in the top-secret laboratories of the Manhattan Project during the later years of the war, others were helping 

to shape the public’s expectations for the postwar international order. The paper will analyze the range of political-economic views 

on display in such widely read texts as chemist and Harvard president James B. Conant’s Our Fighting Faith (1942), ecologist W. C. Allee’s 

“Where Angels Fear to Tread” (1943), geologist Kirtley F. Mather’s Enough and to Spare (1944), and astronomer Harlow Shapley’s “A 

Design for Fighting” (1944); in scientists’ contributions to the Harvard faculty report General Education in a Free Society (1945) and the 

popular edited volumes Science and Man (1942), Beyond Victory (1943), and Our Emergent Civilization (1947); and in the writings of Shapley, 

Harold C. Urey, Victor F. Hess, I. I. Rabi, Philipp Frank, and Arthur Holly Compton for the annual volumes of the high-profile 

Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life. 

Ann Johnson, University of South Carolina (annj@sprintmail.com) 


Molecules or Very, Very Tiny Beams? Writing Algorithms to Model Carbon Nanotubes at NASA 

At the NASA-Ames Research Laboratory since the mid-1990s, computational nanotechnology research has brought together practitioners 

from several different disciplines to try to predict the behavior of carbon nanotubes under a variety of stresses. The rub is that 

these stresses have not been successfully measured in actual nanotubes. Consequently, the computational models must stand in for the 

missing experimental data. Further complicating this process is that fact that constructing models of nanotubes requires both 

macroscale thinking about stresses using beam theory and nanoscale thinking about the geometry of chemical bonds. As a result, the 

construction of new algorithms to blend these effects drawn from different scales has become one of the central projects of computational 

nanotechnology. Algorithm design has also been influenced by parallel developments in computational geometry. Thus a new 

regime of scientific practice is at work here, blending theoretical computer science, engineering theories, and ab-initio chemical models. 

This paper examines this regime and the interplay between computing and nanoscale research at NASA-Ames a site appropriately dedicated 

to both high-end computing and materials science research. 

Kristin Renee Johnson, Arizona State University (johnskri@mit.edu) 


Defending Systematics: The Plague Flea and the Role of Species Identification 

The pathogen responsible for plague, the bacillus Yersinia pestis, was discovered in 1894, but a suggested connection between rats and 

fleas in plague transmission remained controversial. It took cooperation between epidemiologists, field workers, and the flea systematist 

Karl Jordan to resolve the controversy. This episode is often cited in entomological circles as an excellent example of the importance 

of pure entomology to applied entomology and medicine in general. Jordan’s role in the episode took place during a period in which 

systematics lost ground to the resources and prestige of applied entomology and his writings on the subject reveal interesting factors at 

stake in this transition as well as in the history of the naturalist tradition in the twentieth century. This paper forms part of the proposed 

session entitled; Dimensions of the Naturalist Tradition in America 

Matthew L. Jones, Columbia University (mj340@COLUMBIA.EDU) 


Leibniz and the Persona of the Decorous Natural Philosopher 

This paper considers the early modern call for decorous modes of writing and speaking as a central heuristic in Leibniz’s account of the 

persona necessary to encourage the discovery and creation of harmony in the world. The demand for decorous means—techniques 

appropriate for humans—figures fundamentally in his account of outward self-presentation and rhetorical style as well as in his account 

of written techniques necessary for discerning the hidden harmonies in the diversity of natural and mathematical appearances. Such 

decorous writing practices were essential for creating the natural and statistical knowledge necessary for proper rule of the state; such 

a decorous philosophical persona was necessary to enable the monarch to produce the greatest amount of harmony in his domain.

Edward Jurkowitz, University of Ilinois at Chicago (jurkowit@uic.edu) 


Liberal Unities of Mind and Knowledge: Hermann Von Helmholtz’s and Ernst Mach’s Images of Intellect and Epistemology 

Analyzing popular and scientific works I illustrate that the leading German and Austrian scientist-philosophers Hermann Helmholtz and 

Ernst Mach drew extensively from the cultural resources of German liberalism, but turned these resources to different ends. Not only 

did they employ key liberal notions such as freedom and law in their public addresses; they also pursued a particularly liberal form of 

scientific practice. They consciously acted in accord with particular rules when engaging colleagues and foes, and developed a correlated 

set of epistemological standards for determining and framing knowledge and theories. However, Helmholtz and Mach turned common 

liberal values to different ends, in part due to the differing political and cultural situations in the German states and the Austro- 

Hungarian Empire in which they respectively worked. In particular, they differed in the kinds of unity that they promoted within fields 

of science and for the scientific community more generally. Helmholtz worked to lay foundations for fields of science that would ensure 

cooperative investigation on a unique, commonly agreed upon set of fundamental assumptions. In contrast, Mach consciously rejected 

the possibility of a unique scientific foundation, and spent much time undermining the authority of proposed unitary foundations. 

In short, Helmholtz and Mach pursued different conceptions of epistemological and social order within science. 

David Kaiser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (dikaiser@mit.edu) 

Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom III 

The Atomic Secret in Red Hands?: Cold War Fears of Theoretical Physicists 

Two assumptions became widespread among members of Congress, the federal judiciary, and the national media in the years after World 

War II: theoretical physicists alone possessed the “atomic secret” for how to build atomic bombs, and theorists were more left-leaning 

politically than other types of scientists. Yet both assumptions were demonstrably false. The atomic bombs had been designed and 

built during World War II by an intense interdisciplinary collaboration between experimental and theoretical physicists, electrical and 

chemical engineers, metallurgists, and others. Likewise, thousands more experimentalists and engineers than theorists ran afoul of the 

new loyalty-security apparatus in the decade after World War II (at governmental, industrial, and academic laboratories), yet only the theorists’ 

cases reached national headlines. The staying power of the associations surrounding theorists thus points to the changing cultural 

place of “pure scientists” in the United States — and, by extension, to the fraught position of scientific authority more generally — 

during the early years of the Cold War. 

Eriko Kakuzaki, Rissho University (hazime@ris.ac.jp) 


History of Human-Animal Interaction in Japan 

In the present study, we surveyed a history of human-animal interaction in Japan with the view of animal protection and social welfare. 

The most famous law for animal protection is Shorui Awaremi no Rei in1685. It is a notorious law of giving priority to lives of living 

animals over those of human beings. For example, a horse doctor who injured a dog was killed under the law in 1702. However, this 

law had a good aspect. It was against the act of deserting such animals are dogs, horses, cattle. Recently, human-animal interaction in 

Japan has been changing dramatically. Animal assisted therapy at special nursing homes for the aged has become popular. At last, the 

law for assisted dog for disabled person was promulgated in 2000. 

Minsoo Kang, University of Missouri, St. Louis (nikosgnoma@hotmail.com) 

Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom V 

The Living Machines: The Automaton as a Modernist Symbol, 1886 - 1909 

Following the industrial revolution, there is a tendency in European writing to describing the ubiquitous machines of the era as living, 

superhuman beings. This study examines the imaginative works of three early modernist writers - Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Alfred Jarry, 

and F. T. Marinetti - in which the most overt symbol of the age of living machines, the automaton, or a device made to mimic living 

beings, makes appearances. The central contention of the analysis is that the description of such an artificial construct as a vital creature 

and a vision of future merging of humanity with machinery, constitutes an eminently modernist expression of the industrial age, 

as it goes beyond the mainstream nineteenth century attitudes of technophile celebration or romantic rejection. 

Lauren Kassell, Pembroke College, (lauren@ias.edu) 


All Was This Land Full Fill’d of Faerie’, or Magic and the Past in Early Modern England 

Did Adam practice magic? Did he learn it from an angel or the devil? Was it lost in the past, a time when the world was enchanted? This 

paper will chart_the ways in which histories of magic were written and read in early modern England, documenting the meanings that

magic encompassed (including alchemy and astrology), the range of texts in which such accounts appeared (e.g.iatrochemical disputes, 

natural histories, life-writings, histories of Britain), and exploring the extent to which some authors of these works thought that their 

world was disenchanted while others compiled evidence(historical, material, anecdotal) to the contrary. 

Allison B. Kavey, Gonzaga University (akavey@yahoo.com) 


Structuring Nature: Scripting the Natural in “The Secrets of Albertus Magnus” and “Cornucopiae, or Divers Secrets” 

Books of secrets in sixteenth century England provide an excellent opportunity to access popular depictions of the natural world and 

images of natural philosophy. The Secrets of Albertus Magnus and Cornucopiae, or divers secrets are particularly useful for this task, since they 

produce broad images of nature and give specific instructions for its manipulation by careful readers. This paper will examine the ways 

in which each book’s structure contributes to its depiction of the natural world and its position on the appropriate use of natural knowledge 

by a broad range of readers. 

Christine Keiner, Rochester Institute of Technology (cmkgsh@rit.edu) 


Rats, Humans, and Urban Ecology: The Johns Hopkins Rodent Ecology Project, 1944-1952 

This study focuses on the development of a new sub-discipline—rodent ecology—which flourished at the Johns Hopkins School of 

Hygiene and Public Health from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s. Thanks to a partnership between Hopkins, the Rockefeller 

Foundation, and Baltimore City, the Rodent Ecology Project researchers made pioneering discoveries about rat population dynamics, 

populations in general, and urban rat control. Although environmental sanitation had been all but eclipsed by the new public health 

tools of pesticides and antibiotics, the complex behavior of the urban rat meant that those who sought to apply pesticide technology 

to infested city blocks could not ignore the ecological relationships between rats, humans, and the urban environment. Consequently, I 

argue that the Rodent Ecology Project highlights early efforts to apply an ecological approach to the control of urban nature. 

Boumsoung Kim, The University of Tokyo (kimbs@mr.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp) 


Representing Earthquakes: A Historical Interpretation of Seismograms in Meiji Japan 

In this presentation, I would like to discuss the history of Japanese seismology from the 1880s to the 1900s by interpreting visual representations. 

They include not only representations of earthquakes such as sketches and seismic diagrams, but also the results of scientific 

works such as statistical tables, graphs, and maps. It has been said that Japanese science before the 1920s generally was located at 

the periphery of the international scientific community, and seismology was not an exception. Many scholars have retrospectively 

described seismological research until the 1910s as a local science, which had been conducted before Japanese science developed fully 

to the “international” level. I would like to inquire into this general evaluation. I hope that the visual representations will make it more 

visible by whom, where, and how the research was conducted, which would further show us the flow of raw data, processed information, 

and scientific authority. 

Nahum Kipnis, Independent scholar (nahumk@mn.rr.com) 


Are Old Scientific Theories “Rejected” or “Abandoned”? 

To describe the process by which an old scientific theory yields to a new one historians and philosophers of science usually use such 

words as “refutation,” “rejection,” and “confirmation.” In particular, there is an opinion that a theory is “rejected” after being found 

“refuted.” It is not always clear, however, whether these terms refer to actual contemporary views or to scholars’ interpretations of the 

contemporary reaction. I will present examples from the history of electricity and optics of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth 

centuries, which show that, whatever the appearances, the choice between two theories was actually made primarily on the basis of positive 

evidence rather than a negative one. In other words, the main factor affecting scientists’ choice was a constructive capacity of a 

theory rather than its deficiencies. From this perspective, a replacement of one theory by another consisted of a decrease in using the 

former and an increased use of the latter. If this were the case, “abandonment” would describe the fate of an old theory better than 

its “refutation” and “rejection.” 

Jeremy Kirby, Florida State University (Jsk4806@mailer.fsu.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Big Bend A, B, & C

Aristotle’s Rejection of Resurrection 

In the De Anima I.3, Aristotle essays a little argument to the effect that the soul does not set the body in motion in virtue of its own 

motion (406b20-23). For, he maintains, if the soul sets the body in motion by virtue of its own motion, then the soul could undergo 

motion in space. However, if the soul can undergo motion is space, then it would be possible for it to go out and come back into bodies. 

And if the soul can go out of and return to bodies, then dead animals would be resurrected (anastasthai). But the resurrection of 

dead animals is an absurd consequence. The soul, therefore, does not set the body in motion in virtue of its own motion. Whatever the 

merits of this argument,I aim to understand why resurrection would have seemed absurd to Aristotle (at the time of his writing the De 

Anima). Is the claim grounded by empirical or conceptual means? Is this a datum of experience, or a decucible consequence, given the 

essential nature of matter? Aristotle, I argue, seems to have recourse to both approaches. 

Cynthia Klestinec, Georgia Institute of Technology (cynthia.klestinec@lcc.gatech.edu) 


Fabricius and the Dramatic Rhetoric of Anatomical Inquiry 

Working in Padua and Venice, Fabricius of Aquapendente published the results of his anatomical research in the early 17th century. As 

Andrew Cunningham has shown, Fabricius drew both his methodology and his topics of research from Aristotle’s biological works, pursuing 

an Aristotelian project of anatomy. This paper will extend Cunningham’s analysis by showing that Fabricius drew not only from 

Aristotle’s biological works, but also from Aristotle’s Poetics and the numerous commentaries on the Poetics that circulated in the Veneto 

region in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This body of works brought education and pleasure to the fore, influencing 

Fabricius’s textual and oral presentations. This paper will provide an account of Fabricius’ dramatic rhetoric—his use of ‘beginning, 

middle and end’ to organize and develop anatomical process—as well as an alternative history of wonder. This paper will consider the 

possibility that wonder and its cognates (surprise, admiration) derive not only from various philosophical traditions (as Katharine Park 

and Lorraine Daston have explained), but also from a dramatic tradition that had recently been energized by the publication and translation 

of Aristotle’s Poetics. 

Robert E. Kohler, University of Pennsylvania (rkohler@sas.upenn.edu) 


American Museums and Natural History Collecting 

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a period of large-scale biological survey and collecting of animal and plant species, especially 

by large civic museums. Hundreds or thousands of expeditions were dispatched. Unlike earlier natural-history collecting, expeditionary 

collecting was designed to be complete and comprehensive — natural history made into an exact science of the field. Initially, 

museums undertook collecting expeditions less for science per se than to qcquire material for their new and immensely popular habitat 

dioramas. Expeditions served both science and the cultural consumption. Curators became field workers and led expeditions, but 

depended for funding and logistics on diverse local and lay participants. 

Sofie Lachapelle, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (lachapelle@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom VII 

The Prophylaxis and Treatment of Endemic Cretinism by Nineteenth-Century Alienists 

Cretinism is understood today as a condition in which a lack in thyroid hormone (caused by a congenital defect, diseased thyroid, or lack 

of iodine) results in mental retardation and serious problems associated with physical development (dwarfism and thick, flabby skin of 

a yellowish color). Cretinism is found in its endemic form in mountainous regions and valleys, where endemic goiter is severe. The 

condition has been recognized for centuries in the Alpine villages of today’s Switzerland, but it is in the seventeenth century that it began 

to be more seriously considered. Interest in natural history and curiosities led to a number of traveling accounts in which cretins were 

mentioned. During the nineteenth century, more methodical surveys of the various regions where cretinism was prevalent were performed. 

The condition and the particular environmental settings in which it occurs became better known. The causes of cretinism were 

often seen in climatic factors (the stagnation of a corrupted air, heat, atmospheric humidity), geological formations, unknown toxic 

agents in drinking water or food, dirt, or wretched conditions. Preventive measures, sometimes contradictory, were proposed to reduce 

the occurrence of cretinism (prolonged exposure to the sun, shading, drainage, cleaning of the village, relocation, segregation in sanatoriums 

or asylums, and iodine intake). As the construction of new roads, the implementation of a railway system, and improvements 

in the preservation of fish provided the inland with marine products, the incidence of endemic cretinism receded. Although the use of 

iodine had been recommended throughout the previous century, it is not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the iodinedeficiency 

hypothesis was accepted as causal to both goiter and cretinism. This paper will look at the preventive measures and the treatments 

for cretinism promoted by a particular group, the alienists, in the context of nineteenth-century public health innovations. 

Larry Lagerstrom, University of California, Davis (lagerstrom@ucdavis.edu) 


Applied History of Science: The Case of Creation and Evolution 

In the 1986 HSS Distinguished Lecture, John Heilbron put forth a manifesto for applying the history of science to general education,

science education, and science policy. The continuing controversies over creation and evolution provide a challenging test case for this 

endeavor. This paper will review recent developments in the creation-evolution debates, such as the rise of the Intelligent Design movement, 

and explore whether and how historians can make a positive contribution to a field where pitfalls abound and nuanced analysis 

is often trampled. 

Kevin Lambert, University of Califorina, Los Angeles (lambertk@ucla.edu) 


George Boole in Ireland: The Reasoning Self and The Claims of Science 

This paper will look at Boole’s formulation of the laws of a universal and absolute reason in the context of the attempt to provide a 

secular education in Ireland. Going to Queens College Cork as the first professor of mathematics in 1849 was a considerable achievement 

for George Boole. He had learned his mathematics without any formal university education and his appointment underscored 

the high regard with which his work on mathematics and logic was held in mid-nineteenth century Britain. However, Boole’s enthusiasm 

for his new post would soon become muted as Queen’s College Cork became embroiled in religious controversy between Catholics 

and Protestants and involving a close friend of Boole’s called Raymond de Vericour. Boole’s work on his laws for a universal and 

absolute reason would offer solace and hope for the intractable problems he saw surrounding him in Cork. Boole’s reasoning self would 

find its clearest expression in his “Claims of Science,” delivered as a lecture to Cork University in 1852, and his most well known work 

An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. His work on logic was directly related to the philosophy of “le moi,” described by Jan 

Goldstein in her article, “Mutations of the Self,” which described a formulation of this bourgeois self in the “moi-centered” post-revolutionary 

French philosophy associated with Victor Cousin and François Guizot. Indeed, Boole had recommended works by Guizot 

to members of his Mechanics Institute back in Lincoln and de Vericour was Guizot’s nephew. It was de Vericour’s book that first 

involved Boole in the controversy at Cork. 

Hannah Landecker, Rice University (hll@rice.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom III 

What Cells Might Be: Cell Fusion and the History of Biotechnology 

When biological things that operate in predictable repetitive cycles are taken apart or radically rearranged, their cyclical trajectories 

become dislodged and though they continue to live and reproduce, they spiral into novel forms that are unexpected, not predicted or 

even caused by the original intervention. Such is the history of cell fusion experiments in the 1960s in the US and UK that merged 

cultured cells from different species into novel forms such as heterokaryons, synkaryons, and cybrids, and led to the generation of 

classes of fragmented or reconstructed cells such as microcells and recons. This paper examines changes in the practices and concepts 

of “foreignness” and homology that result from the creation of hybrid cell lines, with particular focus on the technical depiction of the 

reconfiguration of the interior landscapes of cells through physical merger with foreign nuclei and cytoplasm. Inevitably the disruption 

of predictable reproduction, in this case through the development of so-called “parasexual” techniques of fusing somatic cells, also 

disrupts settled narratives of what living cells are and what they could be in the future. This specific case study of narrative disruption 

in scientific explanation is linked to the constant production of biotechnical utopias and dystopias over the course of the twentieth century. 

Maria Lane, University of Texas, Austin (marialane@mail.utexas.edu) 


Wonderful, Terrible Martians: Geographic Representations of the Red Planet, 1894-1916 

This paper investigates the ways in which scientific and popular portrayals of the planet Mars’ geography between 1894 and 1916 both 

encapsulated and engendered profound ambiguities regarding the ideal relationship of the Western metropole to alien or exotic landscapes 

and peoples. Specifically, the research project uses archival and interpretive methods to examine textual, cartographic and other 

visual representations of Mars and Martians that were produced by British, Italian, and American astronomers and science writers in 

the late nineteenth century. In popularizing and legitimizing detailed claims regarding Mars’ climate, vegetation, topography and inhabitants, 

I argue, many writers and artists assessed/challenged dominant geographic discourses of modern Western superiority by representing 

the red planet as a utopian landscape inhabited by beings with superior engineering and organizational skills. Archival investigation 

of astronomers’ publications as well as other genres in which astronomical claims were repeated, modified and developed (textbooks, 

media reports, science fiction, etc.) focuses on characterizing their contribution to wider debates about cultural hierarchy, imperialism, 

and the rise of technology. The scientific representation of Mars as a canal-covered landscape and Martians as desert-bound 

irrigationists, for instance, spurred a spate of popular writing on the subject of imagined interplanetary encounters, the colonization of 

the Earth, and the technological modification of Martian landscapes. To evaluate whether such representations functioned as alternative 

or utopian discourses, this inquiry investigates three specific controversies in the representation of Mars: over (1) the nomenclature 

assigned to its geographical features, (2) the mapping of canals on its surface, and (3) the interpretation of such canals as the work of 

intelligent beings. 

Thomas Lassman, Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics (tlassman@aip.org)


The Path Not Taken: Henry A. Wallace and the Reconstruction of American Science after World War II 

The history of American science policy after World War II has focused primarily on the guiding influence of Vannevar Bush’s landmark 

report, Science: The Endless Frontier. In this report, Bush argued that research of the type normally conducted in universities would drive 

technological innovation in industry. He also acknowledged the need for government funds to support the advancement of science and 

technological innovation, but he firmly believed that such resources should be politically insulated from federal control and restricted 

to the best private sector research institutions. The paper will challenge and broaden this interpretive framework by examining an equally 

significant but less well-known science policy proposal introduced by Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace in 1945. An ardent 

New Dealer who had previously served as secretary of agriculture and vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, Wallace proposed a 

state-centered plan for the reconversion of America’s wartime industries back to peacetime production. He believed that existing government 

laboratories, rather than elite universities and other private sector institutions favored by Bush, should provide the scientific 

knowledge that industry, especially small manufacturers, would need to compete effectively in a steadily expanding national economy. 

Manfred D. Laubichler, Arizona State University (manfred.laubichler@asu.edu) 

Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom VI 

Universal Biology - Dream or Reality? 

Connoisseurs of Science Fiction are familiar with the idea of a universal biology. Different, but mostly still recognizable life forms, especially 

to someone trained in morphology, populate novels, movies, and the TV series. In terms of their basic biology, physiology, and 

pathology these life forms represent an extension of earth-based biology or simply a broader comparative focus. A second, and more 

problematic, kind of new life forms is represented by cyborgs, self-replicating automata, and artificial life. The challenge of these life 

forms for (fictional) biology is not too simply broaden the comparative focus, but to generate a new form of universal biology, one that 

is based on more fundamental principles or more general abstractions. However, both ideas—the broadening of a comparative focus 

and the development of fundamental principles of life have also been important strategies in the development of general and theoretical 

biology. This paper will investigate the history of scientific attempts to define a “universal biology” in the context of both new biological 

discoveries and fictional representations. It will be argued that the idea of a “universal biology” has been a powerful force in both 

science and fiction and that the “two cultures” often had a symbiotic relationship with each other. 

Elizabeth H. Lee, Harvard University (elee@fas.harvard.edu) 


Genealogies of Piracy: Alienation and Early-Modern French Geographical Knowledge 

Legal depositions against pirates filed in early-modern France are a rich site for the investigation of the construction of evidentiary 

claims about geography and identity. This paper examines one such deposition through two genealogies to show how piracy ven before 

or independent of the conception of intellectual piracy was complicit in early-modern knowledge production. The Relation authentique 

of Binot Paulmier de Gonneville’s journey to the Indies in 1503-1505, a travel narrative whose topography of ambiguous clues tantalized 

later geographic sleuths, exists as a result of several acts of alienation. Upon returning to Honfleur on May 20th 1505, Gonneville 

and surviving members of his crew filed a deposition with the Admiralty of Honfleur against the pirates whose attacks had alienated 

the crew of the L’Espoir from life and property. For a deposition against pirates, this document contains relatively little about material 

goods lost and a surprising amount of detail about encounters with Indians. While at least one manuscript copy remained in the family, 

a century and a half later an official copy of the deposition was commissioned to help Gonneville’s descendants prove their exemption 

from Louis XIV’s droit d’aubaine or his tax on foreigners. The question at heart was whether or not Gonneville’s adopted son and 

heir Essomericq, an Indian prince he had brought back to France in 1505, had been forced to remain in France. In other words, the 

foreign or non-foreign status of Gonneville’s descendants, issues of Essomericq’s marriage to a relative of Gonneville’s, rested in part 

on a reading of this legal document. This analysis of the genealogies of the deposition and of Gonneville will illustrate how piracy 

contributes to the story of geography broadly construed as the study of the relations between peoples and places. 

Ålbert C. Lewis, Indiana University -Purdue Univ. Indianapolis (alewis2@iupui.edu) 


G.B. Halsted and Mathematics on the American Frontier 

Upon his arrival from Princeton University as mathematics professor at the newly organized University of Texas at Austin in 1884, the 

thirty-one-year-old George Bruce Halsted readily adopted the stance of a man poised for success on the frontier of American mathematics 

and took his place in a society that often perceived itself as standing in contrast with the European and Eastern US traditions in 

which he was raised. His principal mathematical subject, non-Euclidean geometry, originated in the Old World, but he saw himself not 

so much as a researcher as a new type of distinctively American college professor who was devoted to teaching for its own sake. The 

status accorded educators vis-à-vis researchers in mathematics appears to have declined during Halsted’s life, and by the time of his 

death in 1922 the mathematics profession was clearly split between the two. Halsted’s debate over methodology with John Dewey, his 

success with students at Texas, such as L.E. Dickson and R.L. Moore, and the decline of his own career, make him emblematic of some 

of the main trends of the time.

Elise S. Lipkowitz, Northwestern University (e-lipkowitz@northwestern.edu) 


Matters of Family, Matters of State: The Debate over Inoculation in France 1754-1774 

My paper examines the eighteenth-century debate over smallpox inoculation in order to trace the various ways that French cultural elites 

– philosophes, literary figures, and physicians- conceptualized the balance between calculation and sentiment in the relationship between 

parents and children. Proponents of inoculation, who viewed it as an unequivocal medical advance, also recognized that the public was 

resistant to justifications of inoculation based solely on mathematical calculations of risk. France’s foremost advocate of inoculation, 

Charles Marie de La Condamine, urged fathers to love their children with an “amour éclairé” [an Enlightened love] in his 1754 speech 

before the Académie Royale des Sciences. What did La Condamine mean by this notion that implies the confluence of rationality and 

sentimentality two dispositions which historians have traditionally considered incommensurable in eighteenth century culture? To what 

extent did the smallpox debate lead to the articulation of new prescriptive notions of parental love and its relationship to the evaluation 

of risk? Whereas previous studies of the inoculation debate have focused narrowly on its place in the history of medicine or in the 

development of probabilistic thinking in eighteenth-century Europe, my paper situates the smallpox debate within the historiography 

of the eighteenth-century French sentimental family. By shifting attention from the medical debate per se, to the debate over the proper 

roles of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters in a medical decision, this paper rereads the literature on smallpox inoculation to reveal 

the controversy’s cultural and political implications. In an era when the French state turned to the family to strengthen the foundations 

of a social order eroded by commercialism and secularism, the inoculation question became a locus for debating which sorts of familial 

relationships best contributed to the social good. An excerpt from this work addressing the French medical community’s response 

to inoculation was published in the November 5, 2003 issue of msJAMA under the title “The Physicians’ Dilemma in the 18th Century 

Smallpox Debate.” 

Steve Luis, University of California, San Diego (sluis@ucsd.edu) 


Lochner v. New York: Expert and Common Knowledge in the Supreme Court Decision 

I consider the role that expert and common knowledge played in the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case Lochner v. New York. The case 

concerned the constitutionality of a public health provision of New York State’s labor statutes that was, arguably, intended to protect 

the health of bakeshop employees. This paper examines the ways in which the parties employed expert and common medical knowledge 

to advance their arguments. It then discusses how the Supreme Court viewed and utilized these forms of knowledge in its decision. 

Sherrie Lynne Lyons, SUNY Empire State College (sherrie.lyons@esc.edu) 


From Huxley to Gould: Thomas Henry Huxley’s Relevance For Modern Evolutionary Theory 

Gould and Eldredge began their 1977 paper on punctuated equilibrium with Huxley’s caution to Darwin on the eve of the publication 

of “The Origin”: “You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting natura non facit saltum so unreservedly.” Huxley’s 

work in developmental morphology, his belief in the type concept, his evaluation of the fossil record, and his interest in taxonomy all 

suggested that variation was not continuous. Thus, he initially advocated a saltational view of evolution. Although he eventually gave 

up those views, the issues he raised have not been entirely resolved. The gaps in the fossil record remain problematic. Huxley was fundamentally 

interested in how form comes to be generated and the questions he raised are the very ones that have to be answered if 

development is to be fully integrated into modern evolutionary theory. 

Anna Maerker, Cornell Uiversity (akm23@cornell.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country B 

How (not) to be a Museum Visitor in Late-Eighteenth-Century Florence: Micro-Histories and Retrospective Accounts from the Royal 

Museum of Physics and Natural History 

In 1775, Tuscan grand-duke Pietro Leopoldo founded the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History in Florence with the aim of 

promoting public enlightenment. Unlike most earlier collections, the Museum was explicitly open to all classes of society. This new 

institution for the production and dissemination of natural knowledge required the simultaneous creation of a new audience: the museum 

visitor. How was the encounter between visitors and objects envisioned, regulated, and perceived? I compare natural philosopher 

and Museum director Felice Fontana’s prescriptions for museum visitors expressed in Museum display and rules to visitors’ comportment, 

using Grand Tour travellers’ written accounts as well as micro-historical readings of the Museum’s administrative records of complaints 

and repairs. The images of visitors’ encounters with the collection that emerge from these different sources vary widely. I argue 

that the discrepancy between travellers’ retrospective accounts of their experience and patterns of behaviour visible in the Museum’s 

administrative records is due to the diversity of conceptual frameworks for encounters with material objects available to different classes 

of visitors. Interactions with the Florence collection of specimen and instruments could thus be framed, e.g., as similar to encounters 

with relics, or works of art. Finally I address how these diverse frameworks for being a museum visitor conflicted with, and were

incorporated into, the state administration’s efforts to establish the Museum as a site of public education on natural history and natural 

philosophy. 

Patrick McCray, University of California, Santa Barbara (pmccray@history.ucsb.edu) 


Caltech, Project Vista, and the Dilemmas of Lee DuBridge 

In the summer of 1951, more than one hundred scientists and other academics participated in a secret study hosted by the California 

Institute of Technology. The purpose of Project Vista was to determine how existing technologies – tactical nuclear weapons, in particular 

could offset NATO’s weaker conventional forces and repel a massive Soviet invasion of Europe many perceived as likely if not 

imminent. Lee A. DuBridge, a former physicist and Caltech’s first president, convinced the school’s trustees and administration to carry 

out the project for several reasons among others, it brought an lucrative government contract to the school while it performed a national 

service at a time of great international tension. This paper explores how Project Vista came to Caltech and how DuBridge’s reluctant 

acquiescence to Caltech’s conscription in Project Vista during a state of national emergency conflicted with his initial goals for Caltech 

as the school adjusted to the postwar environment. More broadly, this paper’s focus on the local institutional environment provides a 

window onto scientists’ experiences and responsibilities as they attempted to apply their expertise to the relatively unfamiliar world of 

tactics and warfare during the early years of the Cold War. 

Peter McLaughlin, University of Heidelberg (peter.mclaughlin@urz.uni-heidelberg.de) 


Rethinking Internalism in the Scientific Revolution 

The story of Boris Hessen’s famous lecture on “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’/Mechanics” has been 

rehearsed from a number of different angles. Although the talk reportedly had a powerful effect on a number of those attending, those 

not personally present have been almost uniformly derogatory in their evaluations. Two exceptions were Henryk Grossmann and R. K. 

Merton, who explicitly defended Hessen against the misunderstandings and misrepresentations widely accepted by historians, especially 

following G. N. Clark’s attack. In this paper I take these dissident readings of Hessen as a starting point to reevaluate the origin of 

internalism in the historiography of science, which defined itself in opposition to a position that never existed, leading it to study the 

mechanization of the world picture in the Scientific Revolution in abstraction from practical mechanics and technology. 

Colin Milburn, Harvard University (milburn@fas.harvard.edu) 


Nano Worlds: Vision Beyond the Limits of Fabrication 

The recent history of nanotechnology has been characterized by double-vision: in visualizing the nanoscale, in making molecular structures 

accessible through imaging technologies such as the scanning tunneling microscope, nanotechnology simultaneously imagines the 

future. Speculative visions of monumental social, economic and technological changes appear regularly in the writings of scientists and 

others involved in the development of nanotechnology, and these visions are usually linked to experimental successes in bringing the 

invisible atomic world to light. This paper analyzes the double-vision of nanotechnology and suggests that “seeing” the future is a 

media-specific effect of “seeing” the nanoscale, that the fantasy of a disembodied gaze capable of scrutinizing beyond the limits of 

sight and foresight structures the thinking of nanotechnology from its earliest history to the present day. The paper further suggests 

that this double-vision works to make radical technological change possible in the present by unfolding an alienating “world of the 

future” from within the maps and the media generated by its explorations of the new molecular frontier. 

David Marshall Miller, University of Pittsburgh (dmmst115@pitt.edu) 


The Thirty Years War and the Galileo Affair: A Plea for Political Contextualization 

All too often, historians of the “Galileo Affair” focus their attention on the intellectual bases of Galileo’s fateful interaction with the 

Holy Roman Church. They fail to recognize the dynamic – indeed, tumultuous – nature of the political landscape surrounding Galileo’s 

condemnation and the events leading to it. This was a landscape rent by the Thirty Years War, which dominated the affairs of European 

rulers, including Galileo’s patrons. In fact, Galileo’s publication of the “Dialogo” in 1632 could not have come at a more ill-advised 

moment: in the aftermath of the battle of Breitenfeld, the nadir of Catholicism in Germany. Blame for this calamitous defeat fell on 

Galileo’s most important protector, Pope Urban VIII. Thus, when Galileo’s book appeared, Galileo became a useful example by which 

Urban could consolidate his severely weakened position. The Pope carefully crafted the public image of an unusual trial, at the expense 

of his old friend. By telling this story, I aim to focus some attention on the political context of the “Galileo Affair.” Certainly, Galileo’s 

trial resulted from profound intellectual tensions that pervaded the early modern period, but it must also be understood in light of the 

political exigencies of the moment. Historians’ extensive exploration of the intellectual aspects of Galileo’s condemnation should be 

accompanied by more research regarding the less cerebral motivations of those involved.

Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame () 

Sunday, 21-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom II & III 

Caveat Emptor: On the History of Perceptions of the Supposed Independence of Scientific Research from the Forms of Economic 

Support 

Hazime Mizoguchi / Noriko Sato, Rissho University (hazime@ris.ac.jp) 


Japanese Biologists at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole 

During the hundred years from 1890 to 1990, about eighty Japanese biologists visited the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods 

Hole, Massachusetts. The academic careers, relationships with the MBL, and research interests of these scientists are investigated 

chronologically in relation to major biological world events. At the MBL, Japanese biologists were able to learn the latest research methods; 

they were also exposed to the atmosphere in the laboratory; lively discussion between distinguished scientists and beginning investigators. 

Japanese biologists also established professional and personal contacts with American biologists. Hence, the MBL was considered 

by Japanese biologists to be the most influential of all marine biological laboratories. 

Jill Morawski, Wesleyan University (jmorawski@wesleyan.edu) 


Socialized/Civilized: The Promise of Socialization Theory and the Protean Human in Postwar America 

Formulated through the amalgamation of learning theory and psychoanalysis in the 1930s, socialization theory emerged in the postwar 

decades to become a major empirical program and a popular explanatory device for understanding and regulating behavior. Socialization 

theory promised resolution to the binary tensions of individual and society, private and public, conscious and unconscious, and perhaps 

most importantly the theory represented a protean personhood, a human kind capable of change and adjustment. Examination of the 

experimental demonstrations and more general applications of socialization theory illuminate the promises it held for gender, race and 

citizenship in the 1950s. 

Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics and University of Amsterdam (m.morgan@lse.ac.uk) 

Sunday, 21-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom II & III 

The Prisoner’s Dilemma and ‘Modern’ Economics 

This paper analyses the relationships between two early nineteenth century practical sciences in Britain, namely experimental farming 

and classical political economy. The experimental farming activity of the day provided both form and content for David Ricardo’s theory 

of distribution about the allocation of output between economic classes. The formulation of his theorizing paralleled the reporting 

mode of farming experiments, not only in their shared accounting regimes, but also in the thought experiments to be found in each 

successive move in his argument. The content of his thought experiments mirrored the contemporary agricultural experiments that 

tested out the local applicability of technical changes introduced in the previous century. But the peculiarities of his arguments about 

rent can be linked directly to particular questions about spade-husbandry, an issue subject to debate and experiment precisely during the 

years he was developing his theory. 

Timothy Moy, University of New Mexico (tdmoy@unm.edu) 


Recent Applications of History of Science and Technology in National Security Policy 

Recent debates over science- and technology-oriented national security policies in the United States bear some resemblance to debates 

earlier in the 20th century. In this paper, I will examine how the histories of technology-based military reform have been used, and misused, 

in shaping American national security policies and practices since the end of the Cold War. 

Shawn Mullet, Harvard University (mullet@fas.harvard.edu) 


Documenting Atomic Espionage: Historians’ Uses of Government Files 

Since the 1974 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, historians have made ample use of government generated documents 

such as FBI files. In the historical literature on atomic espionage such files have been given great significance in that they offer a detailed 

account of events for which no other written record exists. In examining the cases of Joseph Weinberg and G. Rossi Lomanitz, physics 

graduate students at Berkeley who were part of the Manhattan Project and accused of espionage, this paper questions the legitimacy of 

the accounts offered in such files. After tracing out the main problems associated with government documents on atomic espionage, it

is argued that they should be treated with a degree of skepticism that is traditionally associated with oral histories. 

Tania Munz, Princeton University (tmunz@princeton.edu) 


Birds, Bees, Lights, Camera, Action - Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and the Behavior of Animals on Film 

In this paper, I discuss the role of film in the animal behavior studies of Nobel Laureates Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz. Both 

scientists were enthusiastic and prolific producers of films. They used the medium as a scientific instrument - to capture, slow down, 

and repeat behaviors - and as a didactic tool in their many popular and scientific lectures. I analyze how they tailored their films to fit 

different audiences and discuss the nature of their collaboration with the German Reichsstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm (later, the 

Göttingen Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film), the government arm that supported and distributed most of their films. I also show 

how von Frisch and Lorenz managed tensions between aesthetics, entertainment and standards of scientific decorum, and analyze the 

epistemological status of film as a scientific tool - how was the medium seen vis-à-vis naked-eye observations and how did the staging 

of animals and their surroundings and the inclusion of drawn animations affect its perceived truth content? 

Jane H. Murphy, Princeton University (jmurphy@princeton.edu) 


The Ubiquity of the ‘Uncommon Sciences’: Scientific Practices in 18th-Century Cairo 

Questions of how to characterize and in turn periodize 18th-century Egyptian scientific practices have been at the heart of a debate 

over Ottoman intellectual life of that age. By carefully examining both the intellectual issues that invigorated 18th-century manuscripts 

and the social settings in which these texts and their authors circulated, the scientific practices themselves become valuable sources for 

understanding the wider intellectual and social worlds of eighteenth-century Cairo and their place in Ottoman and Mediterranean contexts. 

I show that different social and linguistic groups were brought together by scientific interest and that these practices were in no 

way antithetical to scholarly religion, Sufism or elite Mamluk culture, but that they existed primarily because of their role in these circles. 

Carla Suzan Nappi, Princeton University (nappi@princeton.edu) 


Dragon’s Blood and Cardamom: The Foreign and the Distant in Early Modern Chinese Natural History 

The history of foreign natural objects in China is simultaneously a history of poison and plague, medicine and commerce. In a literary 

tradition fundamentally concerned with reporting, judging and “correcting” the wisdom of past and contemporary scholars, deciding 

what stories to believe, and why, played a primary role in discussions of natural objects. As they had been previously, observability and 

visibility were important grounds for demonstrating the believability of claims about the natural world, which created an interesting set 

of epistemological negotiations around plants and animals that were NOT easily observable: those at the tops of mountains or deep in 

deserts, buried in vast oceans or deep snow, those whose lifetimes lasted thousands of years, those from foreign lands and unfamiliar 

texts. Shadow, burial, and obscurity are important loci for illuminating Chinese notions of nature. Since earliest recorded times Chinese 

natural history writings incorporated records and descriptions of animals and plants from distant lands and foreign languages, and early 

modern scholarship on natural objects was particularly rich with such claims. Through a careful study of the treatment of “foreign” 

nature in late Ming and early Qing texts, the paper will illustrate the simultaneous roles of observation and obscurity as crucial aspects 

of knowledge-making in 16th and 17th century China, and will attempt to place China in an “early modern” world system of commerce 

of goods and ideas about the natural world. 

William Max Nelson, University of Califorina, Los Angeles (williamn@ucla.edu) 


Healing Time’s Eunuch: Buffon and the Generation of the Future in Enlightenment France 

The French philosophe Georges Buffon is well-known as a natural historian, but several dimensions of his important role in the 

Enlightenment transformation of historical temporality have been overlooked. In the mid-eighteenth century, Buffon carried out 

numerous experiments with animals in an attempt to find the means to counter-act what he perceived as their degeneration. Buffon 

began his endeavor attempting to harness nature’s own regenerative tendency toward a balanced original state. In the process, he identified 

and articulated the theoretical means to “embellish” nature and exceed its original state. He thus opened-up, to an unprecedented 

degree, the possibility of constructing the future of the natural world through willful human intervention. Quite ironically, the understanding 

of historical temporality was transformed as the constructability of the future arose out of Buffon’s attempts to recover a 

“lost” state of nature. 

Elizabeth R. Neswald, National University of Ireland, Galway (lukretz@hotmail.com) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country B

Itinerants and Institutions: Popularizing Science in 19th-century Provincial Ireland 

In the early to mid-19th century, Ireland was an overwhelmingly rural country with few centers of industrial activity, poorly developed 

infrastructures and a population with only little access to education. Interest in science was, nonetheless, widespread, and most provincial 

centers supported Mechanics’ Institutes and various types of scientific societies. Local financial and intellectual resources were, however, 

rarely sufficient to sustain these initiatives. Formal and informal networks of itinerant lecturers, demonstrators and instrument 

makers, including the government-sponsored Provincial Lecturers’ Scheme supplemented, stimulated and even enabled participation in 

science at the local level. Studying the interaction between local initiatives and government-sponsored and directed schemes for science 

education, this paper investigates access to science and the dissemination of scientific knowledge in provincial Ireland and contradicts 

the widespread assumption in Irish historiography that science was rejected as being an external, Protestant imposition and thus inherently 

un-Irish. 

Peter Neushul, University of California, Santa Barbara (pneushul@cox.net) 


World War II War Production at Caltech: The Rocket Program 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy” marshaled the talents of American scientists in both industry and academe. 

Wartime research yielded revolutionary new technologies that changed the course of World War II. Universities made a substantial 

contribution, building new laboratories with funds from the U.S. government. Traditionally academic scientists focused on basic and 

applied scientific problems with occasional interest in technology. During WW II this dynamic changed significantly as University 

researchers performed basic research, developed technologies and even fostered their mass production. This “scaling up process,” often 

associated with industry, was particularly effective at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where an elite team of researchers 

designed, tested, and produced rockets for the U.S. Navy beginning in 1940. In less than five years, Caltech’s High Velocity Air Rocket 

and Tiny Tim went from conceptual design to testing and mass production. Immediately following World War II these technologies led 

to the WAC Corporal program that put the first rocket beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and fostered new aerospace industries in 

Southern California. Caltech’s wartime success also produced a long term relationship between the University, government, and industry 

that characterized post-war U.S. science and technology policy. 

Keith A. Nier, Independent Scholar/ Chemical Heritage Foundation (nierfam@verizon.net) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom II 

Development of Mass Spectrometry: Weighing Ions and the Nature of Science 

The creation, successful growth, and extreme diversification of mass spectrometry has been a major feature of a multitude of scientific 

and technological fields over the past hundred years. Nevertheless, this kind of work usually has been barely mentioned in history of 

science and given even less attention by those proffering accounts of science in general. General understanding of the development of 

modern science has been seriously skewed by this oversight. A brief survey of the continuously multi-national and multi-disciplinary 

development of mass spectrometry will indicate the importance of this range of scientific and technological work. Almost the whole 

of recent science is tied into the overall story, along with much industrial and governmental history, with interesting implications of 

many sorts. In the history of mass spectrometry one can see sophisticated specialization produce unity of science and social construction 

lead to objectivity and commensurability. This overview will illustrate how differently, even old fashioned, science can appear when 

one takes seriously scientific work that is characterized primarily by measurement, not just experiment, by determinations of fact rather 

than just tests of explanations, and by technical capabilities as much (or more) as by theoretical perspectives. 

Catherine Nisbett, Princeton University (cnisbett@princeton.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom V 

Marriage and Widowhood in Amateur Astronomy 

When Anna Palmer married Henry Draper in 1867, she married into an astronomical family. Both Henry and his father John had earned 

reputations for themselves in the American scientific community. Anna and Henry’s first days together were spent shopping for the 

glass that Henry would grind into a 24-inch lens, and they went on to spend every clear night together at their observatory in Hastingson-Hudson. 

Henry died suddenly in 1882, and for a time Anna tried to continue his work herself before being forced to relinquish her 

dream and several thousand dollars to the Henry Draper Memorial at Harvard College Observatory. This paper will explore how Henry 

and Anna worked together and what they produced at their observatory, what it meant for them that he was an important amateur, and 

what place she carved out for herself after his death. Their story will contribute to one already begus with Helena Pycior’s edited volume 

Creative Couples in the Sciences, and will extend the story of the Draper’s partnership into Anna’s widowhood. 

Joe November, Princeton University (november@princeton.edu) 


DENDRAL: Automating Hypothesis Formation

In the late 1960s, computer scientists Edward Feigenbaum and Bruce Buchanan and geneticist Joshua Lederberg led Stanford 

University’s DENDRAL (Dendritic Algorithm) project, an effort to develop heuristic computer programs capable of emulating the 

decision-making process through which chemists infer the structures of complex organic molecules from mass spectrographic analysis 

data. As an exemplar of expert systems, DENDRAL is remembered primarily for its contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, 

but as the embodiment of a formal attempt to model and automate problem-solving behavior it also provides the means to investigate 

how scientists’ hypothesis-formation practices and computer technology have shaped one another. An examination of DENDRAL also 

illuminates the unique nature of the changes computers brought to laboratory practice; like many later computer systems, DENDRAL 

effectively automated creative processes, thus setting it apart from other instruments—e.g. electron microscopes and ultracentrifuges— 

regarded as agents of epistemological change. Finally, because DENDRAL’s proponents explicitly incorporated into their system’s 

design conventions they derived from then prevalent discourses of history and philosophy of science, exploring DENDRAL provides 

a singular opportunity to help elucidate the impact of the professional study of science on science itself. 

Lynn K. Nyhart, University of Wisconsin, Madison (lknyhart@wisc.edu) 


Bringing Natural History to Life: “Practical” Natural History, Museums, and Zoos in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany 

In this paper, I examine a German movement in the 1860s and 1870s to reform and enliven natural history. Articulated most clearly 

by the self-described “practical naturalist” Philipp Leopold Martin (1815-1886) in his multi-volume Praxis der Naturgeschichte (1869-1882), 

this movement sought to liberate natural history from the deadening science of systematics, simultaneously restoring life to the subject 

and giving it a broader appeal. In opposing systematics, Martin was pushing for something bigger than an alternative theoretical perspective: 

he sought to play down the significance of theory overall and elevate the role of praxis in natural history, to enhance the status 

of those who cultivated the “practical” aspects of natural history, such as taxidermic preparation, museum display, and caring for 

living animals. Reformed natural history would thus take natural history out of the hands of the professors and place it in those of “the 

people.” An examination of this reform movement offers a new perspective on the history of natural history practice that views both 

museums and zoos as vehicles for a common reform end. 

Naomi Oreskes, University of California, San Diego (noreskes@ucsd.edu) 


Secrecy and Sea-floor Spreading 

The Mertonian belief that science must operate under conditions of free and open communication has been refuted by our knowledge 

of Soviet and American science in the Cold War. Yet the question remains how scientists negotiated the competing demands of security 

and revelation, and what effects these maneuvers may have had on their science. This paper examines these questions through the 

lens of one of the major developments of 20th century earth science, the theory of sea-floor spreading. Harry Hess’s concept of seafloor 

spreading was critical to the development of the theory of plate tectonics, which in the late 1960s became the unifying theory of 

modern earth science—the first generally accepted global tectonic theory in the history of science. Hess’s ideas were inspired and supported 

to a considerable degree by new information about the sea floor, acquired by American earth scientists working under Navy 

sponsorship, but the Navy did not collect bathymetric data for their relevance to tectonic theories; it collected them for their relevance 

to navigation and the accurate launching of inter-continental ballistic missile, Because of this relevance, Navy bathymetric data were 

routinely classified. Did this matter? Hess thought so, and repeatedly strove to convince the Navy to release classified data on the 

ocean floor, arguing that critical work was being stymied. This paper examines the impact of secrecy on the development of scientific 

knowledge about the Earth in the mid 1950s and ‘60s, and suggests that the general climate of secrecy if not the particulars of security 

protocols—did indeed impede the dissemination, contextualization, and interpretation of critical data. A great deal was learned 

about the oceans as a result of Navy sponsorship of oceanographic research, but that sponsorship was not without its costs, both 

human and epistemic. 

Hanna Östholm, Dept for History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University (hanna.ostholm@idehist.uu.se) 


The “Idea of the University”: The Impact of the Berlin University on Scandinavia and Sweden in Early 19th Century 

Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Schleiermacher and Humboldt were the major theorists on higher education, and also read by Swedish intellectuals 

of their time. Their influence on the debate on higher education seems unquestionable, but early references to them are surprisingly 

scarce. However, there was an ongoing discussion during early 19th century about the purpose and structure of the university, concerning 

the proper disciplines, the organization and relation of the faculties as well as the universities’ location and relation to society – 

all of which both Swedish and German authors touched upon. During this time the Berlin University had been recently founded, as had 

the universities of Christiania (Oslo), Norway and Helsinki, Finland. A major inquiry of the Swedish education was published in 1828, 

and will be discussed both in European and Nordic context. 

Laura Otis, Hofstra University (otis@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country D

Haeckel’s Deferred Action 

As Ernst Haeckel developed his scientific ideas, he steadily altered his portrait of his teacher, Johannes Mueller. Each of Mueller’s most 

famous students (Henle, Schwann, Virchow, Remak, DuBois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and Haeckel) told his own story about what Mueller 

was like, but Haeckel’s has had some of the greatest impact on the historical record. As Mueller’s last prominent pupil, Haeckel had the 

last word, serving as pallbearer at his teacher’s funeral. Unlike Mueller’s more physiologically oriented students, Haeckel adored Mueller’s 

comparative anatomy and marine biology, taking Mueller’s studies of radiolaria as his scientific point of departure . In Haeckel’s early 

works, he mentioned Mueller mainly to cite specific anatomical studies, but his references to him began to change after his enthusiastic 

adoption of evolutionary theory in the mid-1860s. Haeckel’s embrace of Darwinism set off an extended process of Nachtraeglichkeit 

(Deferred Action) in his history of science which caused him to depict Mueller as endorsing evolution in retrospect. An admirer of 

Cuvier, Mueller never believed that species evolved, so this narrative maneuver required considerable agility on Haeckel’s part. In his latest 

depictions of Mueller (1900-1910), Haeckel portrayed his teacher as obsessed with the relations between animal forms but unable 

to solve the “Raetsel” of their affinities, a “Raetsel” that he, Haeckel then solved with his version of evolution and his monistic philosophy. 

Haeckel was the only student of Mueller to claim that his teacher committed suicide, yet his account of Mueller’s unexpected 

death in 1858 (at age 57) has been widely accepted. A close analysis of the way Haeckel changes his portrait of Mueller over time reveals 

how markedly scientists’ current perceptions of their own work can shape the stories they tell about science’s history. 

Sharrona Pearl, Harvard University (spearl@fas.harvard.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Big Bend A, B, & C 

Natural-Born Beggars: Physiognomy and Determinism in Victorian Britain 

This paper will examine the Victorian discourse of self-improvement and personal change against the biological determinsim of physiognomy. 

Using published monographs as well as newspaper and periodical literature, I will look at the ways in which the political and 

class implications of “being born to a face” were used to limit the mobility of the London poor. I will argue that physiognomy provided 

a justification for London’s urban underclass that resonated with and contributed to anti-welfare theories of Spencer and Malthus. I 

will consider the role of visual culture and caricature in establishing the paramaters of this underclass, and the ways in which visual cues 

and perception offered an approach to questions of will and determinism. 

Slobodan Perovic, York University (perovic@yorku.ca) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom V 

Recent Revival of Schrödinger’s 

Ideas on Interpreting Quantum Mechanics and Relevance of Their Early Experimental Critique 

E. Schrödinger’s early ideas on interpreting quantum mechanics, as well as their later reformulation, have been recently reexamined by 

historians and revived among philosophers of quantum mechanics. The doctrines of relational holism and emergentism arise as neo- 

Schrödingerian doctrines. These doctrines share with both Schrödinger’s earlier and later views the common assumption that the corpuscular 

properties of quantum systems can be successfully discarded, and the discontinuities related to measurements successfully 

reformulated in wave-mechanical terms or within the framework of quantum field theory. I argue that these doctrines fail to acknowledge 

the significance of the experimental results concerning electron scattering, in the face of which Schrödinger himself abandoned 

his 1926 interpretation, and which haunted his return to these ideas in the 1930s. In his 1926 papers, Schrödinger argued against Bohr’s 

discontinuous account of quantum phenomena, suggesting that the atomism of classical mechanics fails with regard to very small 

dimensions of the path and very great curvatures. The true laws of quantum mechanics show that the particle cannot be treated as a 

single unit, but rather must be seen as a manifold of paths. Bohr, however, confuted Schrödinger’s interpretation. Schrödinger agreed 

with Bohr’s critique, based on the experiments performed by Compton and Simon and Geiger and Bothe, which demonstrated the corpuscular 

nature of atomic interactions. The experiment’s key point was the angle-dependency that indicated ordinary corpuscular interaction 

between field and matter. In 1935, Shankland’s experiment demonstrated an apparent conflict with the results of Bothe-Geiger, 

partially inspiring Schrödinger’s return to the wave-mechanical interpretation. Subsequent measurements, however, have proven the original 

experimental results accurate. I conclude that the neo-Schrödingerian trend should be cautioned by these experimental results, in 

which the corpuscular properties cannot be “explained away” in wave-mechanical terms, as the discontinuities related to the measurement 

results may. These results concern the pre-measurement property of the interaction that we come to know indirectly through the 

angle-dependency. 

Jahnavi Phalkey, Georgia Institute of Technology (jphalkey@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.) 


Meghnad Saha and the Calcutta Cyclotron 

The origins of nuclear physics can be traced to a few centers in Western Europe and later to the United States. However, there were 

physicists in other countries on the international periphery, where local scientific communities tried to keep up with the research frontiers 

of their disciplines for various reasons, within constraints and with varying results. This paper will examine the motivations to establish 

a nuclear physics research facility by Meghnad Saha, through the story of building the first cyclotron in Calcutta, British India beginning 

1938. Meghnad Saha joined the department of physics in the University of Calcutta in 1935. Traveling on a Carnegie Fellowship 

in the USA, Saha met Ernest O. Lawrence whose group in Berkeley built the first cyclotron accelerator. In 1938, Saha sent an Indian

student, B. D. Nagchaudhari to work with Lawrence so that he would come back and construct a cyclotron for Saha’s laboratory in 

Calcutta. It was decided to build a 38” (5 MeV) cyclotron and the 50-ton magnet arrived safely in India in 1942. However, the work on 

the cyclotron came to a halt in 1944 when Japanese torpedoes sank the ship carrying high vacuum pumps. There were efforts to fabricate 

the pumps locally in the laboratory workshop with small grants from the colonial government. The cyclotron did not function properly, 

and work was slow during the period of political turmoil leading to Indian independence in 1947, when Nagchaudhari went back 

to Berkeley and this time successfully shipped the pumps. It was only in 1959 that people in the laboratory got the cyclotron working. 

It produced its first effective external beam in 1965. This paper will explore the reasons for this delay. It will also provide an overview 

of industrial support in a colonial situation towards handling research at the frontier. 

Tiberiu Marcel Popa, University of Pittsburgh (tmpst26@pitt.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Big Bend A, B, & C 

Metaphysical Implications of Aristotle’s Chemistry 

This paper aims to examine a significant point of convergence between Aristotle’s science, metaphysics, and natural philosophy, and 

focuses on a particular aspect of his treatment of powers or dispositions. My main claim is that Aristotle’s so-called chemical treatise, 

‘Meteorology’ IV, is meant to cast light on the connection between two types of dispositional properties that are dominant in his biology 

(material dispositions like fragility and solubility, and capacities to perform specific functions – such as the capacity of a healthy eye 

to see or the capacity of flesh to function as a medium for touch). The connection between these two orders of dispositions, as revealed 

in ‘Meteorology’ IV, appears to be centered on two applications of the distinction (in ‘De Anima’ II. 5) between different levels of 

potentiality and actuality. These applications of the ‘De Anima’ model form an important contribution to Aristotle’s theory of potentiality 

(as put forth in his ‘Metaphysics’) and seem to foreshadow contemporary theories of dispositions. Most importantly, however, 

these two orders of capacities point firmly to the way in which Aristotle’s chemistry is supposed to be relevant to his zoological treatises. 

Nicholas Popper, Princeton University (npopper@Princeton.edu) 


Abraham, Planter of Mathematics: Making Mathematics Orthodox in Early Modern England 

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, scholars debated the theological orthodoxy of mathematical practice and natural magic. Some 

defended these practices by claiming that they required only the acceptable manipulation of natural causes. But others sought to legitimate 

such activities by constructing genealogies highlighting their orthodox origins. My talk will show how two early modern English 

observers, Gabriel Harvey and Walter Ralegh, created histories supporting the licitness of mathematical practices. Both had been 

attacked by opponents who depicted their knowledge and use of mathematics as heretical and dangerous. Both responded by constructing 

detailed lineages for these practices, extending far back through antiquity. Their genealogies displayed the licit origins of these arts, 

and showed that the inventors used mathematics and natural magic as forms of proper worship. The propriety of natural magic and 

mathematical practice, then, was proven by revealing the creation and transmission of such learning in historical individuals and communities. 

Theodore M. Porter, University of Califorina, Los Angeles (tporter@history.ucla.edu) 


The Cultivated Scientist: Fashioning a Self for a New Age of Science 

Scientific naturalism in late Victorian Britain is now commonly understood as an ideology for the new professional scientist. Along with 

this effort to establish a new basis for a scientific career, however, naturalists such as Huxley talked of a “new Reformation,” in which 

science would assume many functions hitherto identified with Christianity or with a classical literary education. Victorian “men of science” 

did not generally think that this role could be filled by armies of specialists whose background and training were narrowly technical. 

They were pursuing something much grander than enhanced career possibilities for professional scientists. The coming scientific 

society would require men of liberal education. But how could science provide this? “Scientific method,” signifying both a mode of 

inquiry and a morality of truth-seeking, was valued as a solution to this dilemma, a rationale for specialized knowledge that need not be 

narrowing. Perhaps the greatest cultural problem for science in the late nineteenth century was to explain how the scientist could be 

cultivated and wise. 

Maria M. Portuondo, The Johns Hopkins University (mportuondo@sprynet.com) 


Mapmakers at Work: Constructing a Map of the New World 

During the 16th century Spanish royal cosmographers resorted to descriptive narratives and maps to depict the geography of the New 

World. This presentation explores the epistemological and methodological facets of their geographical works by focusing on the practices 

associated with constructing a map of the New World. The practice of translating textual descriptions into maps is illustrated 

through the work of royal cosmographer, Juan López de Velasco (c. 1530-1598).

Matt Price, Univeristy of Toronto (matt.price@utoronto.ca) 


The Hand, Human Nature, and the Art of Prosthesis in World War I 

In the most authoritative German work on prosthetics design to emerge from the fires of World War I, the great mechanical engineer 

Georg Schlesinger has as his epigraph a misquotation from Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. This transcription error 

illuminates the fundamentally novel character of the early twentieth century project of prosthesis, and the notions of mind, body, and 

machine that it developed. Engineers’ and doctors’ attempts to tie their work back to the tradition of the German Enlightenment only 

highlight the vast gulf that separates these two eras and the meanings they attached to all-important terms like reason, nation, and even 

soul. I discuss the project of prosthetic design and physical rehabilitation of maimed soldiers as a project for the technical manipulation 

of subjectivity, and as part of a utopian political project which, though seeking to ground itself in the Enlightenment, misunderstood 

its dramatic separation from the earlier era. 

Patricia Princehouse, Case Western Reserve University (patricia.princehouse@case.edu) 


Haeckel, Goldschmidt, Gould: 100 Years of Contrarian Darwinians 

Contrary to popular (and much academic) opinion, there is no one, true Darwinism, but a dynamic matrix of ideas and approaches that 

embody and extend Darwin’s own plurality of interests and theories. Germany demonstrates this in microcosm. The period from 

Haeckel and Weismann to Goldschmidt established the scope, nature, diversity and trajectory of German Darwinism in the twentieth 

century as theories, experiments and field studies evolved and flourished. To date, historians have misunderstood or oversimplified 

German evolutionary theory, concentrating on scientists and themes isolated from the rich social and theoretical context of German 

biology. The multidimensionality of German biology and even the existence of the German Synthesis of evolution (established prior 

to the Anglo-American Modern Synthesis) have been elided. Yet a deep historical understanding of worldwide changes in late twentieth-century 

evolutionary theory cannot be achieved without tracing the paths by which American paleontologists such as Raup, Eldredge 

and Gould followed Goldschmidt, Schindewolf and Seilacher, and movements such as paleobiology, punctuated equilibria, and evo-devo 

are rooted in the German Synthesis. 

Lawrence Principe, Johns Hopkins University (LMAFP@jhu.edu) 


Wilhelm Homberg and the Chymistry of Light 

Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) was the most celebrated and respected chemist of the early 18th century Academie Royale des Sciences. 

One of his most dramatic claims, made in 1705, was that the matter of light was identical to the chemical principle of Sulphur. This 

paper strives to indicate the experimental background to this announcement, tracing the route by which Homberg was lead to this conclusion 

through seemingly unrelated experiments. The impact of Homberg’s claim is also briefly traced. This study illuminates not only 

the means by with theories are drawn from practices, but also points to some issues in the historiography of early eighteenth century 

chemistry. 

Courtenay Raia, University of Califorina, Los Angeles (plscortena@aol.com) 


Frederic Myers, Depth Psychology and the Spiritual Anatomy of Mind: 

Searching for the Psychical Soul in Late 19th Century England 

This paper will examine how Frederic Myers, a British psychologist and psychical researcher, used abnormal states of consciousness 

to evidence the existence of a ‘subliminal self ’, a transcendent aspect of mind which provided a theoretical model for the “survival of 

human personality after bodily death.” In this manner, he translated mental pathologies into spiritual possibilities, working against the 

grain of other contemporary deviance theories and the materialistic models of mind on which they were based. Myers conducted hundreds 

of case studies on various forms of mental influence, such as hypnotism, telepathy, and automatic writing, and his work served 

as a resource for Jung, James, McDougal and other psychologists looking for a more complex noesis than the prevailing neurobiological 

model allowed. At a time when much of the psychology establishment was busily mapping the mechanical-chemical determinants 

of human behavior, Myers bundled his evidence into a wildly heterodox and expanded view of the human self. His theory of mind proposed 

a ‘multiplex’ personality, organized and coherent at the level of consciousness, but, subliminally, an unbounded, undifferentiated 

sea of potential selves and information. Myers borrowed from physicists’ idealized theories of “the ether” to counter the materialism 

of biologically-based models of mind, proposing that consciousness was a kind of sub-ethereal soul occupying the continuum between 

matter (the brain) and a world within or beyond ether. Theoretically, Myers moved in the opposite direction of the mechanical reductionists, 

resisting both their determinism and materialism by enlarging the concept of “the self,” and with it, the program of psychology.

Ronald Rainger, National Science Foundation (rrainger@nsf.gov ) 


Beyond Being Blue: The Expanding Domain of American Oceanography 

Mid-twentieth century American oceanography was a creature of the Navy. During World War II new weapons systems, principally 

sonar, and mission oriented objectives shaped scientific research. After the war America’s global military and geopolitical goals influenced 

what kind of oceanographic work was done, with what tools, and where. But in the late 1950s, when government agencies asked 

them to participate in studies of atomic radiation and maritime law, oceanographers grasped the opportunity to expand their domain. 

In addition to requesting greater funding for research and education, they began to claim expertise in matters of international diplomacy, 

natural resource management, and environmental policy. Oceanography remained closely tied to the Navy and continued to serve 

the needs of national defense. Indeed increased fear of Soviet science and technology led to an expanded commitment to the science. 

Oceanographers took advantage of the opportunity to obtain additional patrons. More importantly, they employed studies of pollution, 

risk management, and other topics to expand their cultural authority. 

Joan L. Richards, Brown University (Joan_Richards@brown.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom V 

Parallel Universes: Visions of Reason in the De Morgan Household 

The family of Augustus and Sophia De Morgan was arguably among the most diversely creative of the Victorian era. Agustus De 

Morgan was the most prolific mathematician and logician of his generation; his wife, Sophia, was an early pioneer in the world of 

Victorian spiritualism. Five of their seven children pre-deceased Sophia, but one of the survivors, William Frend De Morgan was 

England’s most powerful ceramic artist; his wife, Evelyn De Morgan, was a passionate pre-Raphaelite painter. This paper will explore 

the ways these apparently divergent interests were integrated and supported by an ideal of reason that permeated the family life of at 

least two generations of De Morgans. 

Robert J. Richards, University of Chicago (r-richards@uchicago.edu) 


Haeckel’s and Miklucho-Maclay’s Polymorphous Demonstration of Darwin’s Theory, 

or How to Deep-Six Your Graduate Student. 

The German translator of Darwin’s Origin of Species, G. H. Bronn, added an appendix to the volume that argued Darwin had shown evolution 

to be possible but he had no evidence that it was actual. Ernst Haeckel and his assistant Nikolai Miklucho-Maclay, who was habilitating 

with Haeckel, traveled to the Canary Islands in search of the proof that Bronn demanded. They first stopped in England to visit 

Darwin and other English notables, and then sailed to the Canaries. There they discovered some peculiar sponges that seemed to show 

evolution at work. They believed the polymorphous sponges furnished the missing proof for Darwin’s theory. However, Haeckel and 

Miklucho-Maclay had a great falling out, and Haeckel condemned his once favorite student. This talk will trace the course of events 

that led up to the sponge work and reveal what the great issues were that caused this major breach between the professor and his assistant. 

Jesse Richmond, University of California, San Diego (jbrichmond@ucsd.edu) 


The Art of Ancestral Identity: Pictorial Representation and the Marginalization of “Australopithecus” 

The Taungs skull, unearthed in South Africa in 1924 and first described by Raymond Dart the following year, was the first specimen to 

be classed under the extinct Primate genus “Australopithecus,” now considered by paleoanthropologists to be directly ancestral to modern 

humans. However, while Dart argued in favor of such ancestral status in his initial report to Nature in 1925, a lack of support from 

the most authoritative specialists in the field resulted in the marginalization of the Taungs skull, and of its primary spokesperson, for 

the next several decades. Focusing on the pictorial representations Dart employed to try to persuade other interested scientists of the 

Taungs skull’s ancestral identity, as well as on alternative representations cast by other actors involved in the dispute, I shall trace the 

evolution of the skull’s cultural identity from its inception to its relegation to the borderlands of scientific interest. The resulting narrative 

demonstrates the importance of the communicative practices of scientists in shaping the identity of evidential artifacts, and, due 

to the particular aims of paleoanthropology, of our own identity as human beings. 

Marsha L. Richmond, Wayne State University (marsha.richmond@wayne.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom III

Views of Evolution at the Darwin 1909 Celebration: The Challenges of Mendelism, Mutation, Meiosis, and Saltation 

On the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The 

Origin of Species, biologists from all over the world gathered in Cambridge to celebrate the life and work of the father of evolution. This 

event—coming in the wake of the rediscovery of Mendel (1900), the mutation theory of de Vries (1901-03), the identification of meiosis 

(1905), and the saltationist pronouncements of William Bateson—also heralded a major re-consideration of the theoretical basis of 

Darwinism in the face of significant challenges. This paper surveys the range of views expressed by the world’s leading biologists on 

this occasion and categorizes the various schools of thought about the mechanisms behind evolutionary change. Coming only one year 

before the discovery of the white-eyed mutant in Drosophila, the Darwin Celebration provides a striking opportunity to gauge the status 

of evolution theory on the eve of the chromosome theory of heredity, which soon resolved many of the seeming discrepancies in 

Darwinism. 

Jessica Riskin, Stanford University (jriskin@stanford.edu) 


Dissimulations 

Among the most celebrated automata (mechanical figures of people and animals, literally “self-moving machines”) of the eighteenth 

century were some ingenious fakes: Jacques Vaucanson’s Defecating Duck that didn’t; Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess-playing Turk 

that wasn’t. The fraudulence of these machines raises several questions. First, why did engineers such as Vaucanson and Kempelen, 

who usually did not cheat, decide to do so in these particular contexts? Why fake a defecating duck? Why a machine playing chess? 

Second, why did people believe in the frauds initially (despite, in Kempelen’s case, the inventor’s own broad hints), and stop believing 

in them when they did, soon after the turn of the nineteenth century? Finally, why did trickery (concealed human operators pulling hidden 

strings and levers) entirely replace genuine mechanical simulation in the work of nineteenth-century automaton designers such as 

Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin? The answers to these questions reveal a continuously shifting and changing boundary between life and 

mechanism. 

David Lindsay Roberts, Independent Scholar (robertsdl@aol.com) 


Mathematicians in the Schools: The “New Math” as an Arena of Professional Struggle, 1950-1970 

What is sometimes casually described as the “mathematics community” in the United States already by the late 19th century was displaying 

divisions, which became more distinct and variegated through the course of the 20th century. The aim of this paper is to use 

the arena of mathematics education during the 1950s and 1960s, which encompassed most of the so-called “new math” educational 

reforms, to illuminate fine distinctions between and among professional groups involved with mathematics, notably the American 

Mathematics Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Simple 

dichotomies such as researchers versus teachers, pure mathematicians versus applied mathematicians, mathematicians versus mathematics 

educators, or progressive versus traditional educators offer only limited utility in understanding the complex jurisdictional struggle 

that in fact occurred. By close analysis of the career trajectories of several representative figures from the period, a more nuanced categorization 

will be proposed, yielding a better understanding of the outcome of the reforms. Special attention will be given to individuals 

associated with two of the most prominent curriculum reform projects: the University of Illinois Committee on School 

Mathematics (UICSM), and the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG), originally headquartered at Yale and later at Stanford. 

Volker Roelcke, University of Giessen (volker.roelcke@histor.med.uni-giessen.de) 


Preventing Disease, Improving the Race: 

Genetic Research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, 1917-1945 

The first research institution internationally that was exclusively devoted to psychiatric genetics was the Department of Genealogy and 

Demography at the German Psychiatric Research Institute/Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich. From its foundation in 1917 until 1945, 

it was directed by Ernst Rüdin, one of the leaders of the racial hygiene movement in Germany. Judged in scientific terms and by his 

colleagues abroad, the reserach undertaken by Rüdin and his associates was evaluated as outstanding in 1933/34, and as remarkable even 

in the post-1945 period. This paper analyzes the program and practice of psychiatric genetics at the Munich Institute and Rüdin’s 

involvement in Nazi mental health policy. The idea of a healthy “race” was a guiding principle motivating all of Rüdin’s resrch and political 

activities; it is not possible to distinguish between “good” scientific research untainted by racial ideas and “bad” (pseudscientific) 

research contaminated by racial ideology. 

Kirill Rossiianov, S. I. Vavilov Institute for History of Science and Technology, Moscow (rossiianov@hotmail.com) 


Taming the Primitive: Elie Metchnikov and His Discovery of Immune Cells 

In this paper, I explore Elie Metchnikov’s early ideas about organismic integrity, and link them to the moral theories of Russian pop-

ulists. At the same time, I analyze the impact of Metchnikov’s anthropological work on the evolution of his ideas about the developmental 

arrests, and show in what ways his ‘discovery’ of primitive organs shaped his views about the ‘disharmonies’ in the construction 

of the human organism. Metchnikov’s concept of immunity appears as an attempt to reconcile the idea of organismic integrity with the 

notion of atavistic self. 

Helen M. Rozwadowski, University of Connecticut, Avery Point (helen.rozwadowski@uconn.edu) 


Turning Heads: FLIP and the Technological Imagination in Postwar Oceanography 

The decade of the 1960s in oceanography was characterized by excitement and optimism regarding the possibilities for studying the 

ocean and for the uses to which the resulting new knowledge might be put. This optimism was manifested in almost wildly creative 

proposals for platforms that would give researchers access to the sea. Some of these actually were built. One of the most unusual was 

(and remains; it is still in use) the Floating Instrument Platform (FLIP) designed by staff at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and 

built in 1962 with Office of Naval Research funding. Defined as a manned buoy, FLIP is a 355-foot craft (not self-powered) that can 

be maneuvered to stand on end so that 300 feet extend below the surface, creating a remarkably stable platform for working below the 

wave zone. FLIP can be understood in an institutional context, as a product of Scripps’ Marine Physical Laboratory, one of an array 

of strange platforms and vehicles invented to probe the depths at this time. It equally represents the strong engineering dimension that 

began to enter ocean science in the 1960s, as ocean engineering came into focus as a field in its own right. It also reflects something of 

a Cold War response to Sputnik, as so much of the push for development of oceanography in that decade does. This paper will consider 

how FLIP’s creation reflected the state and directions of oceanography in the 1960s. Some questions to be explored are: Was 

FLIP conceived as a “manned” buoy, as opposed to an unmanned, automatic one, and, if so, for what reasons? Or, was it intended as 

a cheaper substitute to a submarine for observing below the wave zone? Was it built for one, specific military use—studies of sound 

sources in the water—or for the multiple uses to which it was eventually put? Answers to questions such as these will enable a comparison 

of the invention and early use of FLIP with the development and use of scientific instruments and technologies more commonly 

associated with the Cold War. 

John L. Rudolph, University of Wisconsin, Madison (jlrudolp@wisc.edu) 


Millikan, Mann, and the Debate Over General Science in the High School Course of Study 

From 1896 to 1914, Robert A. Millikan and Charles Riborg Mann worked side by side as physicists at the University of Chicago’s 

Ryerson Laboratory. A significant part of their professional efforts during these years focused on high school science education. Such 

activities, which included textbook writing, participation in national education meetings, and teacher education, were not uncommon at 

the beginning of the twentieth century when the line between high schools and colleges was far from well established. It was during this 

time that institutional science (as a result of increased specialization) came to be viewed as out of touch with the practical interests of 

a rapidly growing secondary school population. A solution was offered in the form of a new course, “general science,” which emphasized 

the power of science in everyday contexts. The role of such a course in the overall high school curriculum, though, was unsettled 

at the outset. The ensuing debate over general science between Millikan, who would go on to fame as a Nobel laureate in physics, and 

Mann, who pursued a career in education, reveals the conflicting professional interests and ideologies of science that vied for acceptance 

during these early years of educational ferment. 

Andrea Rusnock, University of Rhode Island (rusnock@uri.edu) 


Making Sense of Vaccination circa 1800 

Smallpox inoculation and vaccination were introduced and practiced in Europe during the eighteenth century. Both procedures provided 

instances of deliberately induced immunity. Histories of immunology (including textbook histories) typically begin with a cursory 

description of these two procedures and yet little has been written about how contemporaries made sense of them. In a recent article, 

Anne-Marie Moulin has examined what she calls “the paradox of immunization without immunology.” Smallpox inoculation, smallpox 

vaccination, and Pasteur’s rabies vaccine, she notes, were all developed without any “theoretical advances in the understanding of immunity.” 

Although empirical demonstrations of the efficacy of vaccines often took precedence over theoretical accounts of how vaccines 

work, contemporaries did attempt to make sense of immunization. In this talk, I will examine how physicians conceptualized inoculation 

and vaccination in the decades surrounding the publication of Edward Jenner’s “An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the 

Variolae Vaccinae” (1798). 

H. Darrel Rutkin, Stanford University (drutkin@mit.edu) 

Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom VI

Francis Bacon’s Reform of Astrology: De augmentis scientiarum III, 4 

Hard on the heels of his impeachment in 1622 as Lord High Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon turned to revise, augment and render 

into Latin his “Advancement of Learning”(1605). One of the wholly new features in the newly entitled “De dignitate et augmentis 

scientiarum” (1623) is an extensive proposal in book III, chapter 4, where Bacon lays out guidelines for a natural philosophical reform 

of astrological theory and practice. He argues that one may thereby achieve greater insight into his two major areas of concern: nature 

and politics. I will discuss the contents of this text and place it in the context of Bacon’s political career, thus articulating the place of 

astrology in this courtier’s toolkit. I will also briefly discuss its influence. 

Julia R. Saari, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (jrsaari@history.umass.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country B 

A Space of Their Own: Making Room for the Public at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center 

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created as a civilian space agency to oppose its Soviet military counterpart, 

but the creation of the space agency as a public institution had unintended consequences. The architects and administrators of 

NASA underestimated the role that the public would attempt to play in their new institution. As the manned space program became an 

increasingly important part of society and culture, as well as a source of national pride, the American public sought to become more 

involved. In southern Florida, NASA’s activities had a tremendous impact on the surrounding communities. Not only did some of the 

key events of the 1960s take off from their back yards, NASA’s presence also changed the nature of local economic development, 

employment, and tourism. In response, these communities demanded a way to participate in the activities of their new neighbor. The 

administration found a way to accommodate these demands by creating a visitor’s center at the Kennedy Space Center. This center filled 

a local and national need for a public space within NASA. 

Neeraja Sankaran, Yale University (neeraja.sankaran@yale.edu) 


What Was a Virus? – The Status of Bacteriophage in this Debate in the Early 20th Century. 

The question, “What is a virus?” is likely to elicit a fairly consistent set of replies from the contemporary biological community. A century 

ago however, the replies of different scientists would have presented a confused, even contradictory, picture. The nature of viruses 

was a subject for much lively debate, and the answers represented science in a state of flux. Indeed, the early 20th century is peppered 

with instances of scientific disputes surrounding the identity of various discoveries as viruses. A notable example is the bacteriophage, 

which was identified as an “ultravirus” by one of its discoverers but rejected as such by many in the wider scientific community. 

In this paper I contextualize the debates on the nature of the bacteriophage within the broader context of the evolving concept of 

viruses. In particular, I focus on work of Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1960 Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine), who worked on the 

bacteriophage in the 1920s and 30s, and whose research on the phenomenon of lysogeny contributed to the general acceptance of the 

idea that the phage was a bacterial virus. 

Jutta Schickore, Indiana University (jschicko@indiana.edu) 


The Infamous Globule Hypothesis 

Very often, historians have ascribed a largely negative role to error, failure, and fault: Error – the erroneous result – is an obstacle to scientific 

advancement, something that has to be identified and removed so as to allow science to progress. In my paper, I seek to show 

that errors can play a much more productive part for the practice of research. To do so, I concentrate on the so-called “globule theory” 

of organic matter, which was widely advocated among microscopists in the early decades of the 19th century. According to this theory, 

muscular and nerve fibres consist of strings of tiny globules. Historians of the microscope have claimed that the ‘erroneous’ globule 

hypothesis could eventually be overcome when better instruments were introduced and novel histological theories came to be adopted. 

While I do not deny that technical advancements did occur in the early decades of the nineteenth century, I wish to stress that they 

were inextricably intertwined with a novel awareness of the limits and impediments of microscopical vision, which informed both the 

practicalities of making and of applying the instrument. I argue that the microscopists’ novel methodological concerns with the nature 

of light and especially with the effects of preparation procedures were crucial both for the refutation of the globule hypothesis and for 

the emergence of alternative views of nervous tissue. I conclude the presentation with some more general considerations as to the role 

of errors, faults, and failures in scientific practice. 

Peter Schimkat, Independent Scholar (schimkat.peter@vdi.de) 


A Truly German Science”: Attempts to Redefine Geology in Interwar Germany 

From the early 1920s onwards, German geological periodicals bore witness to remarkably wide-ranging debates concerning the concept, 

aims and future development of the science of geology. These discussions, covering virtually all conceivable aspects of geology’s disciplinary 

identity and ranging from its public face (e.g. strategies to spread geological knowledge among the wider public) to internal 

methodological questions (e.g. the status of causal laws in geological research), served as a springboard for a view which was then argued

forcefully by some influential geologists: to trace the root of geological thinking to the Romantics and to claim a fundamental 

“Germanness” of the science. This perspective, together with some rather ingenious attempts to construct a new philosophy and a fitting 

historical account of geology, proved to be amazingly influential even in the longer run; though parts were toned down, remoulded 

or forgotten in the post-War years,it has continued to enjoy considerable success, particularly in the popularization and historiography 

of geology in Germany. The talk will analyse the origin and the core features of this specific viewpoint, as well as offering some 

examples of its still lingering influence. 

Henning Schmidgen, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (schmidg@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) 


The Early History of Reaction Time Experiments, 1850-1865 

The history of reaction time experiments is usually traced back to the research work carried out by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and 

the staff of his Leipzig laboratory founded in 1879. This paper offers a different account. It draws attention to the fact that measuring 

reaction times in human beings was already performed by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) in the context of his pioneering investigations 

of nerve impulse speed in frogs (1850). Helmholtz did not publish any detailed report on his findings in the time experiments 

with humans. However, in the following years, scholars such as Adolpe Hirsch, Rudolph Schelske, and Friedrich Kohlrausch set out to 

verify experimentally the general results Helmholtz had given in a popular lecture in 1851. Based on archival evidence, the paper argues 

that the ensuing debate about methodological and technological problems in reaction time measurements anticipated key issues discussed 

by the growing community of psychologists throughout the 1880s and 1890s. The reaction time experiment is thus traced back 

to the research carried out by physiologists, astronomers, and physicists well before Wundt started his lab at Leipzig. 

Hans-Walter Schmuhl, University of Bielefeld/Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaft (hans-walter.schmuhl@uni-bielefeld.de) 


Racial Science, Eugenics, and Developmental Genetics: The Politics of the Paradigm Shift at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for 

Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1938-1945 

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWIA) serves as a prime example of the symbiotic 

instrumentalization of science and politcs during the Third Reich. However, precisely because of this symbiotic relationship in the area 

of racial science, genetics, and eugenics during the early years of the Third Reich, research practice in these fields became somewhat 

calcified. As a result, the first Director of the KWIA, Eugen Fischer (1874-1967) and his former student, and second Director (since 

1942) Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer (1896-1969), initiated a reorganization of the Institute’s reserch program under a new paradigm of 

developmental or physioloical genetics (Phänogenetik)—a research trend that was internationally recognized in the early 1940s. This 

resulted in a shirft of focus from a concern with the human genotype to phenotype. In addition, it marked a new preoccupation with 

the interaction of proteins, enzymes and hormones as well as the interplay between genes and environment in the developmental 

process. Perhaps most importantly for the interface of biology and politcs under the Nazis, this new research direction at once served 

as a novel and interesting resource for National Socialist racial policies, led to the designation of the KWIA as “war essential,” and paved 

the way for morally problematic and outright criminal activities on the part of some KWIA scientists. 

Rebecca Press Schwartz, Princeton University (rpress@princeton.edu) 


Scientists Under Scrutiny in World War and Cold War 

In the years of the early Cold War, the national security state focused a great deal of scrutiny on the physicists who were supposed to 

be at once technically capable of revealing nuclear secrets and constitutionally unsuited to guarding them. While that scrutiny was in 

some ways a reaction to the unique foreign and domestic political circumstances of the Cold War years, it drew upon and continued the 

security that was a feature of the wartime Manhattan Project. Among the manifestations of this continuity were the transfer of personnel 

to the Atomic Energy Commission from the Manhattan Project, the transfer of investigation files from the Manhattan Project 

to the FBI, and the continued emphasis during the postwar years on the same people who had been most suspected during World War 

II. While the emphasis on Communist espionage seems explicable in the early Cold War context, that assessment is complicated by the 

realization that that emphasis, too, was a continuation of the primary emphasis on Communist espionage during World War II, when it 

seems a less likely priority. This talk will examine how the Manhattan Project put into place the people, apparatus, and investigations 

that were readily available to be drawn upon in the postwar period in the service of the newly urgent security imperative to prevent 

atomic espionage. 

Anne Secord, University of Cambridge (pas6@hermes.cam.ac.uk) 


Social Class and the Boundaries of the Field in Nineteenth-Century British Botany 

In 1830s Britain, men of science began self-consciously to shape diverse forms of knowledge of nature into scientific disciplines, 

attempting to establish a hierarchical distinction between the work of generalisers and local collectors. This paper will explore these

changes, examining situations from the late eighteenth century onwards in which practitioners of widely differing social status worked 

together in the field. Power relations in the field were complex and ambiguous, as gentlemen sought out artisans with recognised expertise 

in finding plants and asked them to serve as guides. The social experience of artisans and gentlemen botanising together, rather than 

impressing upon artisans their status as subordinate observers and establishing the place of local information in the hierarchy of scientific 

knowledge, became instead an opportunity for artisans to exert and display their own forms of authority and skill. 

Jonathan Seitz, University of Wisconsin, Madison (jwseitz@wisc.edu) 


Science in the Holy Office: The Inquisition and Views of Nature in Early Modern Venice 

The religious turmoil of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe charged conceptions of the supernatural and natural worlds with 

unprecedented significance. In Venice, the Holy Office (Inquisition) exercised the Church’s coercive power to establish orthodox definitions 

of, and criteria for distinguishing between, the natural and the supernatural. However, the Inquisition did not simply impose the 

views of Church officials onto the rest of society. The Holy Office served as a forum for the presentation of competing ideas about 

the characteristics and operation of natural and supernatural powers, including ideas held by social groups often absent from the history 

of science. Close examination of Inquisition records reveal how criteria for identifying natural and supernatural events changed over 

time, and how such criteria varied among different social groups in early modern Venice. 

Rena Selya, Harvard University (selya@fas.harvard.edu) 


Viruses, Cancer and the Institutionalization of Molecular Biology 

In the 1960s, molecular biology emerged as an institutionally and financially independent discipline. This paper will compare and contrast 

the effect of molecular biology on the departments of biology at MIT and Harvard University in the 1960s, considering the ways 

that personnel, research, funding, and curricula changed as a result of the molecular revolution. These changes were not always welcome, 

and the differences between the paths of the two departments provide insight into the ways in which the biology community at 

large viewed the nascent discipline. The key figures in these departments, Salvador Luria and James Watson, already had significant experience 

in virus research, as well as longstanding interests in the biology of cancer. Luria and Watson both went on to direct institutions 

that used virus research and other molecular techniques to explore the genetics of cancer. Through their guidance, microorganisms and 

tumor research became mainstays of molecular biology research and support, with clear effects on the way college students learned biology 

and their professors sought funding. By the mid 1970s, the twin pillars of viruses and cancer helped make molecular biology the 

central focus of biology education at these two research universities. 

David Sepkoski, Oberlin College (dsepkosk@oberlin.edu) 


Paleobiology in the 1970s: Punctuation, Mass Extinction, and Quantification 

Despite its important role in the emergence of evolutionary theory in the 19th century, paleontology was largely marginalized by the 

evolutionary community during much of the 20th. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, however, this situation changed drastically. 

In 1984, the geneticist John Maynard Smith spoke for the wider community of evolutionary biology: “the paleontologists have 

too long been missing from the high table. Welcome back.” Central in this rapid transformation were the efforts of a group of young, 

quantitatively-minded paleontologists whose studies of the dynamics of macroevolutionary patterns and extinction drew attention to 

the importance of the fossil record as a source for evolutionary theory. This group was led by Stephen Jay Gould, who mustered many 

of the most promising paleontologists of his generation “including David Raup, Thomas Schopf, and Jack Sepkoski” to participate in 

the reconstruction of paleobiology as a theoretical discipline. While Gould’s saltationist views (expressed most vividly in his theory of 

punctuated equilibria) are well known, an equally important factor was the success of new approaches in the quantification and simulation 

of extinction patterns, which lent credence to Gould’s punctuated model. This paper will examine this history and will argue additionally 

that the new quantitative, deductive approach in paleobiology allowed a partial reconciliation of saltationist, catastrophist views 

with more traditional gradualist principles. 

Adam R. Shapiro, University of Chicago (adams@uchicago.edu) 


The Evolution of the “New Civic Biology” 

George W. Hunter’s “New Civic Biology”, published by the American Book Company in 1926, was intended to replace the 1914 “Civic 

Biology”, which gained notoriety after John Scopes used it to teach evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. Among the more notable differences 

between the two texts is the omission of the word “evolution” from the new book. The revision process that led to the “New 

Civic Biology” began even before the Anti-Evolution Act was even proposed in Tennessee, and continued even after publication of the 

first edition of the new textbook. Along the way, the relationship between Hunter and his editors (which was never an easy one to begin 

with), became increasingly complicated and strained. The content of the new textbook came about not only as a result of the politics 

of the country—increasingly hostile to teaching evolution but also in large part to the politics of the American Book Company itself,

and its relationship with one of its most profitable authors. 

Hanna Rose Shell, Harvard University (shell@fas.harvard.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom VII 

Hide: Reframing Wartime Natural History and the AMNH Alaska Brown Bear Group 1937-1945 

The Hall of North American Mammals is a popular, permanent exhibit of twenty-five wildlife dioramas at the American Museum of 

Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. From this Hall’s ribbon-cutting in 1942, its patrons, designers and promoters hoped that 

the exhibition might simultaneously preserve and distill the whole history of North America – insofar as American history is (and always 

had been) implicated in its natural history. Nationalism would be immortalized in the windowless confines of an urban cosmopolitan 

museum through the curatorial and taxidermic processes of museum natural history. My paper, “Hide,” addresses the complexity of 

these processes, through a close focus on one diorama in particular — the Alaska Bear Group, created between 1937 and 1941. Framed 

by an archway that recalls a stage proscenium, the Brown Bear Group presents a story of animals and environment inextricably bound 

together through ecological processes. A hulking, upright, male bear confront an array of animal, vegetable and mineral cohabitants 

as well as human observers, as the colorfully painted background merges with a three dimensional foreground; meanwhile the entire 

diorama is encased behind a glass wall that simultaneously invites human viewers and excludes human participation. Drawing on the 

AMNH’s textual, visual and exhibitionary archives, I examine the standing bear’s construction, display and reception over the past sixty 

years. In the process. I read against the grain of this distilled – or perhaps better to say “stilled” – vision of nature. Finally, I argue that 

the taxidermied form can be best understood as an amalgamation of animal’s skin, hunter’s ambition, taxidermist’s craft, and viewer’s 

gaze. 

Grace Yen Shen, Harvard University (gyshen@fas.harvard.edu) 


Scientific Worldviews: Chinese Geology and International Science,1911-1949 

The rise of Chinese geology in the Republican era was supported by the riches of China’s vast territory, an ambitious and talented group 

of young researchers, and intense international interest. The relationship between these factors, however, remains obscured by the standard 

mechanistic story of modernization and progress leading from the end of the imperial era to the Communist regime. This paper 

traces the methods that Chinese geologists employed to disseminate news of their work abroad and keep abreast of the latest developments 

in the geosciences. Analysis of meetings, publications, exchanges, and correspondence, highlight the ways that international scientific 

and political economies shaped China’s research priorities. However, Chinese geologists also faced inward, addressing a domestic 

audience of political, industrial, and social modernizers, as well as a growing corps of non-elite geological workers. By juxtaposing 

international and domestic representations of geological activities in China, I hope to explore the more general question of how scientific 

internationalism disciplined the development of new scientific communities into national bodies, especially in the field sciences. 

William Shields, Virginia Tech (highc.king@verizon.net) 


The Strange Tale of Centrifugal Force 

Centrifugal force has been something of a thorn in the side of physics since the time of Christiaan Huygens. Physicists in training more 

likely than not are informed that there is no such “force” or that it is “fictitious,” a mere artifact of the principle of inertia applied to 

circular motion. But modern engineering textbooks not only refer to centrifugal force in a theoretical sense—they use it in calculations 

for the design of pumps and other devices. Newton, in the context of gravitation and motion in a central field, explained that it is “centripetal 

force” that opposes the tendency of a body to move in a straight line. And Newton’s theory on this matter became gospel. So 

why is “centripetal” virtually absent from the English lexicon, whereas the person in the street has a fair idea of what centrifugal force 

is? In this paper, I will report on research-in-progress to trace the history of centrifugal force from the 17th century (Huygens’s De 

Vi Centrifuga) to the present to shed some light on this strange state of affairs. 

Peter A. Shulman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (skip@mit.edu) 


Why Let a Petroleum Geologist File Your Taxes? 

During the 1920s, oil companies employed geologists to advise them on the complicated nuances of oil land tax laws. Many of these 

geologists had been part of a staff of nearly one hundred scientists and engineers in the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s Oil and Gas 

Division during World War I. From an office building in Washington, D.C., they analyzed production statistics to develop techniques 

for estimating the quantity of oil in a given well. Both the Treasury and oil companies had a stake in these calculations: like the depreciation 

allowances taken by industry to offset the decreasing value of capital investments, oil land owners were permitted a “depletion 

allowance” to reflect the declining value of oil land under the pump. Yet the value of oil land (and hence its taxable worth) was direct-

ly related to the quantity of oil it held. The problem for the U.S. Treasury became determining that quantity. In the years after the war, 

the estimation techniques developed by the Oil and Gas Division were used to forecast an impending national oil “famine.” Throughout 

the 1920s, public debate on the security of the oil supply was framed in terms of competing mathematical estimates. In this paper I 

examine the wartime employment of oil geologists and show how the state’s imperative to mathematize nature (for tax purposes) led to 

intractable political conflict and fears of an impending oil shortage. 

Cibelle Celestino Silva, Universidade de Campinas, Brazil (cibelle@ifi.unicamp.br) 


Dimensional Analysis and the Search for the True Nature of Electromagnetic Quantities: 

The Contribution of Reginald A. Fessenden 

Nowadays, physicists use two unit systems in electromagnetic theory, related to different dimensional views of the electromagnetic magnitudes 

the electrostatic and the electromagnetic systems. Physicists usually admit that the choice between the two systems is arbitrary 

and is related with the free choice of the units through which the electromagnetic quantities are expressed. However, in the late nineteenth 

century the approach to physical dimensions was very distinct. Maxwell, for instance, thought that dimensional analysis could be 

helpful in finding the true mechanical representation of electromagnetic quantities in terms of mechanical quantities such as mass, 

length and time. A hot debate about the best dimensional system took place during the last two decades of the 19th century. Many 

important physicists, such as Rudolf Clausius, Oliver Lodge, Joseph John Thomson, Hermann Helmholtz and others, discussed this 

issue. The great number of published papers about this subject shows that the main issue behind the debate was the attempt to determine 

the best model for the electromagnetic ether. In the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, Reginald Fessenden tried to establish, 

through theoretical and experimental arguments, the true dimension and physical nature of electromagnetic quantities. In this paper, 

we present and discuss Fessenden’s arguments and their context. 

Rebecca Slayton, Stanford University (rms@mit.edu) 


Between Science and Activism: Boycotting Star Wars 

In the mid-1980’s, over 7,000 U.S. scientists and engineers engaged in an unusual political intervention by pledging to refuse research 

funds from the “Star Wars” missile defense program, a program they called “ill-conceived and dangerous.” Here I analyze how a tension 

between expertise and activism flowed throughout the scientists’ boycott – from the diverse disciplinary and institutional cultures 

of the scientists and engineers, through interactions with the mass media, and back to shape the strategies of the boycott organizers. I 

structure this account around three discursive engagements between scientists and the media. Each one demonstrates how the contextual 

and interactive nature of science communications gave rise to variable messages. But each engagement also demonstrates a consistent 

tension between discourses of activism and science, suggesting that common interpretive frames structured these interactions. I 

argue that the boycott achieved legitimacy to the extent that its expertise came to be discursively identified with hopes of democracy 

rather than fears of technocracy. By analyzing how discursive engagements stabilized or destabilized particular forms of political intervention, 

this study extends and links studies of the relationships between and among experts, the media, and Cold War politics. 

Hilary A. Smith, University of Pennsylvania (smithhil@sas.upenn.edu) 


Does the “Early Modern” Shoe Fit? Foot qi and Chinese Nutritional Science 

Foot qi (jiao qi), an ailment that modern Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) textbooks equate with biomedicine’s beriberi, is an old 

disease, appearing in Chinese texts at least as early as the seventh century AD. The biomedical understanding of nutritional deficiency 

diseases such as beriberi rests on the idea that a person’s everyday diet, often little different from her neighbors’ diets, can kill her. If 

such an understanding represents modernity in nutritional science, do the Chinese concepts that preceded it represent early modernity? 

Though the symptoms associated with foot qi have remained recognizable through the centuries, the meaning of foot qi and its perceived 

relationship with diet have changed a great deal. Using foot qi as the illustration, this paper will assess how well “early modern,” 

dynastic, and other common types of periodization fit the development of Chinese nutritional knowledge. 

Eva Ahrén Snickare, Nobel Museum (eva.snickare@nobel.se) 


Medicine and the Media: The Human Body on Display around 1900 

This paper deals with medical and commercial displays of human bodies around the turn of the century 1900. These different types of 

exhibitions are revealed as connected through a series of representing and ordering practices. They can be regarded as one and the same 

visual culture, centered on the (normal and deviant) forms of the human body. However, there were also important differences between 

the medical and commercial displays: both the audiences and the way these audiences were addressed differed between the professional 

and the popular contexts. Exhibited artefacts communicated rather different meanings in different settings. Preparing specimens and 

models for purposes of research and education was a central practice in the anatomical and pathological institutions of the 19th and 

the early 20th centuries. The visualisation of bodily structures was crucial in developing as well as communicating anatomical and patho-

logical knowledge. Mastering various forms of visual media therefore constituted an important part of a medical scientist’s professional 

repertoire. At the same time as specimens conserved in various techniques were on display in medical museums, the general public 

could see artefacts of the same kind in the popular wax museums. Another phenomenon closely connected to the medical discourse 

was the freak-show: they both objectified odd or deviant bodies for their own interests. Wax museums, freak-shows and medical museums 

also share a common history, dating back to the old collections of curiosities. Other connected phenomena around 1900 were 

phrenological and hygienic exhibitions. This media history of medical imagery and display concerns scientific and popular concepts of 

medicine and the body. It also involves questions about cultural representations of power, gender, class and ethnicity. 

Laura J. Snyder, St. John’s University (snyderl@stjohns.edu) 


Lord Only of the Ruffians and Fiends?: William Whewell and the Plurality of Worlds Debate 

Upon receiving a copy of William Whewell’s work, Of the Plurality of Worlds, in 1853, his friend John Herschel wrote back: “So this then 

is the best of all possible worlds—the ne plus ultra between which and the seventh heaven there is nothing intermediate. Oh dear! Oh 

dear! ‘Tis a sad cutting down. Lord only of the Ruffians and Fiends….I can’t give in my adhesion to the doctrine that between this 

and the angelic there are not some dozen or two grades of intellectual and moral creatures….” We may presume that Herschel’s tongue 

was firmly in cheek, but his dismay was real. Like most other scientists, philosophers and religious people in Britain in the nineteenth 

century, Herschel endorsed the view that the universe contained numerous other worlds populated by intelligent inhabitants. (Indeed, 

his own work on the double stars had contributed evidence, according to many, for this pluralist position.) Whewell’s book was one of 

the first by an eminent intellectual to oppose this general trend since the 16th century. What was perhaps most odd about this is that 

Whewell had endorsed pluralism twenty years earlier, in his contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises (works commissioned for the purposes 

of showing how various scientific disciplines could contribute to Natural Theology). In this paper I will show that Whewell’s 

reversal had mostly to do with three factors: important developments in his philosophical outlook; the influence of Richard Owen’s 

theory of archetypes on Whewell’s view of the argument from design, and Whewell’s perception of a need to strengthen such arguments 

in light of evolutionary accounts of human origins; and new findings in the sciences of geology and astronomy. By examining 

this shift in Whewell’s position, we may increase our understanding about the interplay between science, religion and philosophy in the 

plurality of worlds debate in the nineteenth century. 

Alistair Sponsel, Princeton University (asponsel@princeton.edu) 


Fathoming the Depth of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Coral Reef Formation. 

This paper is a revisionist account of the development of Charles Darwin’s theory of coral reef formation. I argue that Darwin undertook 

a coral program long before the presumed genesis of his work on reef formation, and show how accounts that emphasize the geological 

implications of the theory overlook the theoretical weight of his ongoing work on coral biology and distribution. I will propose 

that Darwin’s coral theory is based on the model of Humboldt’s theory of altitudinal speciation, and I will argue that this view sheds 

new light on the significance of the Beagle’s hydrographic mission for Darwin’s theory-making. 

Matthew Stanley, Iowa State University (stanley@fas.harvard.edu) 


The Pointsman: Maxwell’s Demon and Victorian Freewill 

James Clerk Maxwell’s “demon” is conventionally understood to be an attempt to show the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics. 

This is certainly an important element, but in this paper I will explore the cultural roots of the demon, particularly in 

Maxwell’s religious development. Maxwell’s Christian faith was a mix of several theological influences, but issues of free-will and human 

choice in the world were always central to his religiosity. He initially modeled the human soul as a pointsman on a railroad as a way to 

retain free-will in a mechanistic universe. This image of human choice coming from very slight evasions of energy physics provided a 

resource he later applied to the problems of statistical understandings of thermodynamics. Maxwell’s demon was thus a theological 

construct as well as a thermodynamic one, and this paper will investigate the relationship between its role in these different contexts. 

Laura Stark, Princeton University (lstark@princeton.edu) 


Practicing Morality: Psychological Research Practices and the Rise of Human Subjects Regulations in Postwar America 

During the 1970s, the research practices defined by professional psychologists as morally acceptable for their own discipline would form 

a prominent part of the newly created US federal human subjects regulations. This extended the reach of the practices beyond their origins 

in experimentalism and in the discipline of psychology, and therefore imposed the possibilities of knowledge and conceptions of 

the subject that such practices imply. By focusing on psychology, this paper develops an account of American human subjects regulations 

beyond their legitimating myth, which paints the American regulations as an obvious and direct response to the Nuremburg Code. 

Engaging with recent interest in morality among historians of science, this paper argues that postwar psychologists defined their moral 

methods at a time when commitments to the proper way to conduct experimental research came into conflict with ideas about the

appropriate ways to treat people. Fueled by a desire to make psychology appear more professional and by a preference to self-regulate, 

members of the American Psychological Association (APA) created the profession’s first code of ethics through the early 1950s, with 

two distinctive features: a lack of concern with the ethical treatment of human subjects, and a decision to create the code inductively, 

building the moral guide around a survey of member psychologists. By the mid-1960s, however, popular backlash and congressional 

hearings directed at the discipline spurred a revision of the professional code, again using the inductive model, this time specifically 

aimed at delimiting the proper treatment of research subjects. Receiving thousands of survey responses attesting to the questionable 

treatment of human subjects by their colleagues, leaders of the APA wrote a narrow and detailed new version of the code. Yet this new 

version would be reworked countless times over three years because of the outcry, particularly from experimental social psychologists, 

claiming that research would be impossible under such ethical restrictions. Eventually, some research practices, such as debriefing, were 

deemed virtuous by the APA, rendering morally acceptable some practices, such as deception, that were fraught and yet necessary for 

experimental research. 

David Steffes, University of Oklahoma (David.M.Steffes-1@ou.edu) 


Causal Connections, Nature’s Game and Organismal Perspective: 

The Role of Chance in Sewall Wright’s “Balanced” Evolutionary Theory 

The extraordinary career of American geneticist Sewall Wright unites three prominent areas in the history and philosophy of science: 

statistics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of biology. Unfortunately, discipline-bounded scholarly discussions have treated these 

facets of Wright’s science as if they were independent of one another. In this paper I seek to link these aspects of Wright’s work and 

so to provide a more complete picture of his science. I will do so by focusing on one of modern science’s hallmark concepts: chance. 

A persistent preoccupation with causal interrelationships pervaded Wright’s multifarious accomplishments, such as path analysis in statistics, 

the “shifting-balance” theory in evolutionary biology, and organicism in philosophy. In his view, the prerequisite for an understanding 

causal systems (whether in statistics, biology, or philosophy) was an appreciation for nature’s game. For Wright, the statistical 

study of causal links yielded a bold indeterminism not easily appropriated within the biology of his time. Consequently, Wright’s perspective 

on life’s processes diverged from that of his “neo-Darwinian” peers, most notably from R.A. Fisher’s analysis of causal interrelations. 

Ironically, Wright’s views—the importance of chance mechanisms at sublevels, the hierarchical order of nature, and the central 

role of equilibrium conditions in driving change—more closely resembled today’s perspective on life than did those of the vanguard 

of the evolutionary synthesis. 

Mary Terrall, University of Califorina, Los Angeles (terrall@history.ucla.edu) 


Réaumur’s Networks of Knowledge and Practice 

By virtue of his enmity with Buffon, Réaumur has been largely shunted aside in the historiography of the 18th-century life sciences, but 

his prolific work arguably set the standard for observational natural history. It deserves careful examination for what it can tell us about 

the practice of natural history, and for unexpected connections between mundane work with e.g. chicken breeding and the most hotly 

contested theoretical questions of the day. Réaumur made a practice of avoiding grand theorizing or speculation while coordinating a 

global network of correspondents who fed his prolific appetite for curious phenomena and previously unknown organisms. His books 

on insects and chickens sparked enormous interest in observation, collecting and experiment among his readers, on a spectrum that 

included provincial intendants, colonial physicians, noblewomen with time on their hands, clerics, and small landowners. They also 

inspired extensive research programs in young people who subsequently made natural history their own work, men such as Bonnet, 

Trembley, Lyonet, Bazin and Lelarge de Lignac. This paper looks at Réaumur’s work on breeding as an arena where development of 

technology and instrumentation (incubators, thermometers, hygrometers), rational improvement (increasing poultry production), theories 

of generation, management of correspondence networks and production of books all contributed to a form of natural history that 

incorporated elements of genteel country life, urban academic science and artisanal work. Manuscript material on Réaumur’s breeding 

experiments will be discussed in the light of this nexus of problems. 

Charles Thorpe, University College London (thorpe73@yahoo.co.uk) 


Scientific Freedom, Cold War Liberalism, and the Oppenheimer Case 

This paper examines the cultural impact of the 1954 Oppenheimer loyalty-security hearing in relation to Cold War liberalism. It argues 

that the powerful significance of the case for American intellectuals was due to the central place which the notion of scientific freedom 

had assumed in the conceptualization of liberal political freedom during the Cold War. The notion of scientific freedom had become 

an important element in American intellectuals’ framing of the ideological conflict between the capitalist democracies and communism. 

At the same time, an idealization of science went hand in hand with liberal intellectuals’ increasing distrust of popular democracy and 

mass movements in the wake of World War Two and in response to the rise of McCarthyism. For Cold War liberals, science was the 

key to defending liberal democratic culture against pressures from expansive communism abroad and irrational populism domestically. 

Against this background, the Oppenheimer case represented not just an institutional crisis in the relationship between the scientific community 

and the state, but was widely understood as a cultural crisis which went to the core of the relationship between intellectuals and

democratic culture. 

Margareta Tillberg, Vaxjo University, School of Industrial Engineering (meka@swipnet.se) 


New Eyes. Department for Organic Culture, Leningrad 1920s. 

My paper will present the Department for Organic Culture, at GINKhUK (State Institute for Artistic Culture) in Leningrad in the 1920s. 

GINKhUK was one of the many institutes founded after 1917 for arts and sciences where the main object was to study man in all possible 

facets. This meant to find the smallest denominators in different art forms from the Renaissance and onwards. In the vein of 

Enlightenment, the end product should be an encyclopaedia of the arts defined according to “Artistic Culture.” The supervisor of the 

Department for Organic Culture was Mikhail Matiushin (1861-1934). Matiushin was originally trained as a musician. “NOT viskusstve” 

(Scientific Organization of Work in the Arts) signalled the direction of the research. Firmly based in observations in nature, the aim of 

the research of the Laboratory of Colour and Form was to develop a colour theory as a part of the encyclopaedic grammar and to train 

the innate anatomy into a kind of sharpened vision. Eyes, ears, skin and brain were to be trained to merge into what Matiushin called 

“extended vision”. This special kind of vision (sometimes, but only in non-published sources, was also called “higher consciousness”) 

included a visual angle of 360° and ability to see colours intensely even in badly illuminated circumstances. With sources drawn from 

wild animals (hares, eagles, lions), 19th- century experimental psychology and physiology (Hermann von Helmholtz, Johannes von 

Kries) the anatomy of the eye was explored. The achieved abilities were believed to be inheritable. The idea of a New Man was in accordance 

with the time. The experiments of colour vision produced a book published in 1932 as one of the last manifestos from the 

Russian avantgarde. The same year censorship would allow only expressions made according to the Socialist Realist method. My work 

is based on archive research in Russia. 

Sara Tjossem, Columbia University (sft2101@columbia.edu) 


Competing Visions for Marine Science in the North Pacific 

In the early 1970s, an international group of marine scientists informally discussed developing a regional marine science organization 

for the North Pacific analogous to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). Subsequent talks eventually led to 

intergovernmental meetings and culminated in the 1992 establishment of the North Pacific Marine Science Organization, (PICES). Its 

development was profoundly affected by changes in the Law of the Sea, particularly Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and the restructuring 

of international fisheries commissions. An examination of PICES in comparison with ICES and the North Pacific Anadromous 

Fisheries Commission highlights tensions of how best to enhance interactions between scientific research and its applications, and 

among subfields of marine science. 

Sigurd Tønnessen, Center for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen (sigurd.tonnessen@svt.uib.no) 


Creating Physics: Kepler’s Analysis and Synthesis of Geometry, Kinematics and Dynamics 

Kepler is a giant in the history of science, not only because of the three laws of planetary motion associated with him, but because of 

his insights into the manner in which knowledge of the physical world can be achieved. As it is pointed out in several recent works on 

Kepler, his insistence on physical explanations is the key factor in understanding him as a historically important and influential figure. I 

argue that Kepler’s complex and apparently incoherent and disconnected arguments are justifiable and necessary steps in the development 

of and justification for his first two laws. The various discussions in Kepler’s Astronomia Nova are indispensable parts of the project 

of establishing a physical foundation for astronomy. Kepler’s requirement that the explanatory system must include causes necessitated 

revisions and analyses of all three levels of physical representations: geometry, kinematics and dynamics. The most characteristic 

feature concerning the revisions and analyses of the representations and explanations are their mutual dependency. A specific outcome 

of the analyses at one level will influence the other levels in a specific way. By following Kepler’s reasoning it is shown how he develops 

several of the main characteristics of Newtonian physics and calculus, e.g. that motion has to be decomposed and represented as 

an instantaneous quantity in order to reveal underlying causes. Moreover, I claim that his final arguments on dynamics relating to the 

area-law are valid in a manner that, so far, has not been fully recognised. 

John Tresch, Northwestern University (j-tresch@northwestern.edu) 


The Automaton and its Uncanny Kin in French Fantastic Literature, c.1848 

The automaton occupies as central a place in nineteenth century fantastic literature as the mesmerized patient, the revenant, and the 

inanimate object eerily endowed with life. This paper reads the figures of the uncanny developed in French fantastic literature as a record 

of anxieties accompanying rapid scientific, technological, and political change. Some of the shifts which took place in this period, refig-

ured in tales of transmutation and haunting, include the quantitative harnessing of previously mysterious fluids such as electricity, magnetism, 

light and heat in post-Laplacean physics; the emergence of steam power in transport and heavy industry; and the eradication of 

the old regime and the fitful cycle of revolution and reaction which followed it. In Freud’s famous theory of the uncanny, a “disquieting 

strangeness” is explained as the revelation of the individual psychic past in the reactions of the present; my analysis will expand to 

include other cases in which distinct ways of worldmaking are brought into sudden and jarring contact: the encounter of distinct places 

(as in the Orientalism of Nerval), times (both in new speculative fictions and in the nostalgia of a lost aristocratic order), and worldviews 

(as in the “gestalt switch” of Kuhn’s theory of scientific change, figured in imagery of alchemy and bewitchment). Despite a fascination 

with mechanical processes of production and communication, in the pages of fantastic literature, a new image of the self, subject 

to overwhelming irrational forces, emerged; at the same time the field of “literature” took shape, as the repository for “subjective” 

explorations of language and the human imagination. This paper situates mid-century images of the automaton and related imagery in 

their context, a history of mechanical subjectivity that connects new modes of understanding the self with new technologies for the 

mastery of nature. 

Olga A. Valkova, S. I. Vavilov Institute for History of Science and Technology, Moscow (valkova@ihst.ru) 


Women Taking on the Role of Scientist in Nineteenth-Century Russia 

The decade of the 1860s served as a watershed in many aspects of social life in nineteenth-century Russia, including the establishment 

of the cult of science among the public and the beginning of an active struggle for women’s equal access to higher education. But even 

before Russian women obtained legal rights for higher education, and before they were allowed to work as college teachers or 

researchers, a number of them had already managed to establish themselves as members of the scientific community, including several 

women who were elected as corresponding members of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. This paper examines the first generation 

of female scientists, revealing how they came to accept and understand their newfound roles. 

Steven R. Vanden Broecke, The Johns Hopkins University (sbroecke@jhu.edu) 


Disciplining Astrology: Notes on the Publication of Tycho Brahe’s World System (1588) 

Disciplinary “role-reversal” and courtly patronage contributed greatly to our understanding of Renaissance astronomy. However, the 

motivations of courtly patrons in supporting disciplinary hooliganism are still a matter of contention. This paper seeks to advance this 

conversation by focusing on the publication of Tycho Brahe’s geo-heliocentric system (1588). The latter is often portrayed as a “theoretical” 

event, seeking to contest or redefine various academic traditions of representing nature and supernature. As an alternative, I suggest 

that the publication of Tycho’s world-system was a disciplining act aimed at the “practice” of judicial astrology. This interpretation 

avoids certain assumptions about the historical events surrounding Tycho’s publication and its performative function in a court setting 

that seem weakly supported. 

Holly C. VanScoy, Academic Research Associates (academres@aol.com) 


The Role of The Psychological Sciences in The Supreme Court’s Decision in Brown v. Board of Education 

An content analysis of psychology journals in the ten years before and after the landmark Supreme Court decision ending segregation 

is used to examine the extent to which scholarly research informed the decision, as well as the extent to which the decision bolstered 

scholarly research. This analysis supports the conclusion that research in psychology was more impacted by the judicial decision than 

impactful of the decision. Alternate interpretation of the results are also provided, including reflections on the status of scholarly journals 

and publication standards of the period. 

Charissa S. Varma, IHPST, University of Toronto (charissa.varma@utoronto.ca) 


Early 19th Century Taxonomy and Essentialism: William Kirby’s Place in the History of Systematics 

Pre-Darwinian naturalists aimed to catalogue nature into efficient, practical information storage and retrieval systems that also attempted 

to reflect the real, natural order of living things. However, historians of systematics have focused not on their aims and practicality 

but on their metaphysics: their belief in the fixity of species created by God and their belief that the task of taxonomy is to discover 

the “essences” of species. Ernst Mayr has stressed that pre-Darwinian naturalists were essentialists. Arthur Cain’s argument that 

Linnaeus is a prime example of such a naturalist has been widely accepted. One would expect William Kirby the pious author of one 

of the Bridgewater Treatises to fit this image perfectly. Yet Kirby’s claims in his great 1802 monograph on bee taxonomy frustrate any 

attempt to squeeze him into the boxes Cain and Mayr have constructed. Kirby’s “Monographia Apum Angliae” uses a variety of “type 

concepts”, some of which resist this essentialist characterisation. While Kirby’s beliefs about species were certainly creationist, his 

methodology was quite unconstrained by his creationist worldview. More importantly, Kirby admired Linnaeus and adopted large portions 

of Linnaeus’s system precisely because he saw Linnaeus behaving in ways counter to our present understanding of essentialism.

Jeremy Vetter, University of Pennsylvania (jvetter@sas.upenn.edu) 


Knowledge, Capitalism, and the States: 

The Role of State Surveys in the Economic Development of the U.S. Central West, 1890-1920 

Surveys are scientific tools of state authority; they enable a territorial domain to be known and governed. But they also reflect the larger 

economic forces of a particular time period, such as the state-promoted expansion of capitalist agriculture and mining across the 

United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state geological surveys were established in the new states of the West, 

such as Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Sometimes these states also funded natural history surveys of the 

plants and animals of their political territories, although less generously. The proponents of state geological and natural history surveys 

articulated a direct relationship between scientific surveys and economic development. This paper seeks to understand that relationship 

more analytically by examining state-funded surveys established in the Central West between 1890 and 1920 long cast by U.S. historians 

as a decisive watershed in the triumph of corporate capitalism and state bureaucracy. By the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, 

scientific experts began to gain a foothold in states which had been bastions of alternative visions of economic development, especially 

Populism, in the 1890s. I argue that the main role of surveys in this time period in the West (especially geological surveys) was to 

facilitate the expansion of large scale capitalism. In addition to the obvious task of training experts who might have careers in industry, 

these surveys also nurtured a common stock of public knowledge and provided credible knowledge to support investment decisions. 

Margarete Voehringer, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science Berlin (voehringer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) 


How to Experiment with Instruments, Stones and People – 

Nikolai Ladovski’s Psychotechnical Laboratory for Architecture, Moscow 1926 

In post-revolutionary Russia, life has become an experiment. The Russian Avantgarde took the new communist society as a quasi-artistic 

attempt and followed the formalist idea of “Art as a method” for visualization, trying to free the automated perception of the suppressed 

worker by way of artistic alienation in order to produce an “enlightened Proletarian”. But within this experimental set-up, the 

Fine Arts were assisted by the life-sciences of the time: psychology, physiology, psychophysics and in the 1920s predominantly, psychotechnics. 

All these disciplines can be synchronized in one major vision: to build a new world for the new, revolutionized human being 

– which first of all meant to produce new preconditions for visual perception. My paper will introduce the “Psychoanalytical Method” 

and the “Psychotechnical Laboratory” of Nikolai Ladovski, an architect at the VChUTEMAS (Higher Artistic-Technical Laboratories) 

in Moscow. In order to study the visual perception of architecture via lines, angles, volume and space, Ladovski in 1926 installed a series 

of instruments in a room painted completely black, the so-called “Glasometry” (eye-meter). The reports on his experiments carried the 

measurement factors “attention”, “memory”, “perception measurements” and “spatial and motorical abilities” - thus physiological as 

well as psychological criteria. I will compare Ladovski’s experiments on human perception to contemporary experimental practices and 

thereby contextualize them with the Russian Avantgarde and with the Applied Sciences. In doing so, I question anew both the objects 

and agents of the arts and sciences in Soviet Russia and the density of their disciplinary borders. The complicity of psychotechnics with 

the arts will shed a new light on the latter’s function as a means for communication beyond language – in Ladovski’s case via space. 

Amber Vogel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (ottotwo@email.unc.edu) 


From Frankenstein to Frankenfoods: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Secondary Education in the Biosciences 

This paper will describe “DNA Narratives,” an interdisciplinary curriculum that has been successfully piloted in secondary schools in 

North Carolina by the Partnership for Minority Advancement in the Biomolecular Sciences (with funding from the Howard Hughes 

Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health). This curriculum emphasizes the narrative threads in biology the stories and histories 

that pique interest, expand vocabulary, supply analogy, and imprint knowledge. In a time of increasing demands on teachers and 

students to prepare for state- and nationally mandated tests, these narratives can help them weave useful, reinforcing connections among 

biology, language and visual arts, and social studies. Modules in the “DNA Narratives” curriculum are informed by the interdisciplinary 

approaches of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experimenters and explorers and their literary counterparts. This paper will focus on 

three modules: “Frankenstein’s Fingerprints,” “The Evolution of Evolution,” and “Exploring New Environments.” These modules dealing 

with genetics, evolution, and ecosystems, respectively draw on the lives and works of figures like Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin, 

Mary Shelley, and William Blake to provide historical contexts and literary frameworks for what are sometimes challenging topics on the 

pre-college biology syllabus. In combination with a range of innovative pedagogical techniques, this approach helps teachers and students 

across disciplines make connections among spheres of knowledge, as well as between past and present advances in scientific 

understanding. 

Adelheid Voskuhl, Cornell University (acv3@cornell.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom VII

Bourgeois Automata: Mechanical Bodies and Autonomous Subjects in the 

Nascent Civil Society of Late 18th-Century Germany 

Of the literary writers working in the infamous period often referred to as ‘around 1800’ in Germany, it was in particular Jean Paul who 

made automata a major concern in his texts. Between 1785 and 1792 he wrote five satires which illustrate and elaborate on various 

mechanical and epistemological aspects of ‘machine-men’. While Jean Paul’s texts are notoriously fragmentary and enigmatic pieces, 

replete with subtle and obscure allusions and metaphors, they are also an intriguing and significant microcosm of the scientific and political 

preoccupations of late 18th-century Germany. Taking close readings of a few key passages of these satires as a starting point, my 

presentation first sketches out briefly the tradition of the Early Enlightenment in Germany and the role of the mechanism, the machine, 

and the human body in it. This tradition was one of the most important intellectual currents on which the political and the (natural) 

philosophical modernity in Germany was built. Second, I will demonstrate that, even in the reactions to, and criticisms of, the rationalist 

epistemologies of the Early Enlightenment (as they are expressed, for example, in the traditions of the Late Enlightement and the 

Early Romanticism) the motif of the automaton was far from being a clearly marked spectre of the all-encompassing mechanical worldview. 

The mechanism and the principles of (self-)determination and rationality coming with it were an important part in the negotiation 

of principles of ‘sensitive’ selfhood and bourgeois subjectivity in the nascent civil society in the German lands. Taking Jean Paul’s 

literary expression as an example, I aim to elucidate the intricacies of the motif of the automaton and its paradoxical connotations at 

that time to explain the role of the man-machine in the beginnings of modern society in Germany. 

Mark A. Waddell, The Johns Hopkins University (m.waddell@gmail.com) 


Magic, Magnets, and Machines: Jesuit Depictions of Artifice and the End of Nature’s Wondrous Power 

Around the middle of the seventeenth century, several important treatises penned by Jesuit authors — most significantly, Athanasius 

Kircher, Gaspar Schott, and Francesco Lana Terzi presented readers with a conception of the world in which the wondrous and mysterious 

powers of Nature were replaced as a focus of discussion by the spectacle of human (or, more precisely, Jesuit) ingenuity. Filled 

with demonstrations of artificial magic and depictions of machines designed to harness and exploit these natural powers, such works 

permitted the revelation and subsequent devaluing of Nature’s secrets while they simultaneously affirmed the skill and power of the 

Jesuits themselves. 

Brett L. Walker, Montana State University (bwalker@gemini.oscs.montana.edu) 

Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Texas Ballroom VII 

Global Science and National Distinctiveness: Animal Representations and the Birth of Ecology in Japan 

In the 1930s and 40s, Japanese scholars, who defined their field as “ecology” (seitaigaku), began fashioning their own version of the 

new global science that sought to elucidate the organic relations between living things and their environments. In particular, Imanishi 

Kinji, when crafting theories of wolf extinction, preferred to look at the influence that human activities and the environment had on 

animal societies as a whole and not focus on the internal mechanisms that might be behind the individual animal’s struggle with the outside 

world. Similar to the “organismic” ecological tradition in Europe and the United States, Imanishi represented animal societies as 

holistic organisms unto themselves – such as aggregations of wolves or monkeys and not as individualistic social animals. In the case 

of Imanishi, a Confucian and Buddhist milieu linked directly to the Kyoto school of philosophy provided the context for many of his 

scientific theories, such as those outlined in his philosophy of biology, Seibutsu no sekai (The world of living things; 1941); but in his 

more scholarly writings on biological communities, such as the Seibutsu shakai no ronri (The logic of biological societies; 1948), he 

repeatedly referenced the scientific observations of such prominent European and American ecologists as Victor Shelford, Charles 

Elton, and Warder Clyde Allee. The influence of the Kyoto school of philosophy on Imanishi meant that he and many later Japanese 

ecologists, when representing animals, tended to focus on the organic interrelatedness of the entire known world: all things, argued the 

famous Kyoto philosopher Nishida Kitar, shared a “common origin.” But because the global “organismic” tradition of ecology stressed 

biological interrelatedness as well, Imanishi could seamlessly wed the distinctive Kyoto school with global trends in science. By focusing 

on Imanishi’s debate with ethnologist Yanagita Kunio, and his use of Shelford, Elton, Allee and others in his writings, this short 

paper will argue that even though Imanishi is often hailed as having created a distinctively “Japanese” form of ecology, biology, and 

most importantly, primatology ones that mirror Japan’s “exquisite harmony” (bim no ch wa) with the natural world and its group-oriented 

culture his theories were as much the product of global ecological discourses. Imanishi’s representation of animal societies as 

holistic a holism commonly attributed to a Japanese way of thinking and often seen as an alternative to the Darwinian focus on the individual 

was in fact Imanishi’s attempt to engage Western ecologists. Imanishi’s animal representations thus not only trace the global 

exchange of scientific ideas, but force scholars to ask whether there is a “Japanese science,” one different than that practiced in the West. 

Jessica Wang, University of Califorina, Los Angeles (jwang@history.ucla.edu) 


Knowledge and Policy: Pragmatism, Law, and Social Science in New Deal America 

How do assumptions about science and technology shape conceptions of political organization, order, and authority? In the realm of 

early twentieth century American law and politics, science and technology came to provide not merely objects for policymaking and reg-

ulation, but ways of thinking and doing that permeated the very interstices of political thought and action. This paper will examine the 

New Deal as a site in which modernist political concepts, based in particular kinds of technocratic understandings of the state and its 

prerogatives, influenced legal thought and public policy in the 1930s. The focus will be on securities regulation and industrial labor relations, 

two areas in which pragmatist notions of knowledge (rooted in shifting understandings of science) and the ideal of social science 

played major roles in shaping policy. Most accounts of technocratic politics have emphasized its single-minded scientism and remove 

from human concerns, but the New Deal’s legal pragmatism insisted that science meant recognizing the socially contingent nature of 

truth and the lived realities of social existence as the basis for dynamism and flexibility in the forging of public policy. Where the relationship 

between law and social science proved synergistic in the Securities and Exchange Commission, however, it was antagonistic on 

the National Labor Relations Board. The complex nature of technocratic politics under the New Deal begs scholars to go beyond the 

Taylorist “one best way” toward a more intricate, nuanced understanding of how science and technology serve as models for law and 

politics. 

Zuoyue Wang, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (zywang@csupomona.edu) 


Technical Aliens:_Chinese Scientists in the United States and the Politics of the Early Cold War 

When Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing on October 1, 1949, there were about 5,000 

Chinese students and scholars studying or working in the United States. Now “stranded” by the cut-off of official bilateral relations, 

these students and scholars, a sizeable number of whom studied science and engineering, nevertheless gained significance as the two 

governments tried to win their loyalty. What happened to them? In this paper I examine the experiences of these American-trained 

Chinese students and scientists, especially those who chose to return to China, against the background of the early Cold War and the 

Korean War. Their choices were framed and their fates were shaped by multiple factors: personal background, family situations, 

American and Chinese domestic politics, as well as the international Cold War. In many ways, this also represents a peculiar case of 

state-sponsored international scientific exchange. 

Thomas P. Weber, Lund University, Dep. of Animal Ecology (Thomas.Weber@zooekol.lu.se) 


Spiritualism, Evolution and the Plurality of Worlds: 

A Comparison of Alfred Russel Wallace, Camille Flammarion and Carl du Prel 

In the late 19th century, the then fashionable spiritualism was linked to evolutionary theory and the plurality-of-worlds-debate in the 

writings of several prominent authors. Alfred Russel Wallace objected strongly to the plurality of worlds out of his evolutionary and 

spiritualistic convictions. In contrast, the popular French astronomer and Lamarckian Camille Flammarion supported the idea of extraterrestrial 

life. The Bavarian ex-officer Carl du Prel buttressed his belief in the plurality of worlds with spiritualism and a developmental 

evolutionary theory. I will compare the ideas of the three writers and attempt to find an explanation why apparently similar starting 

points led to different outcomes. 

Debbie Weinstein, Brandeis University (dfweinst@brandeis.edu) 


Through the Looking Glass: Technologies of Perception in Twentieth-Century American Psychotherapy 

This paper will explore the role of perception in 20th c. American psychotherapy by examining how mid-century family therapists used 

one-way mirrors in their therapeutic interventions and the training of new therapists. Family therapy emerged as a new approach to 

psychotherapy in the 1950s, against the backdrop of American psychiatry’s dominance by psychoanalysts and renewed postwar concerns 

about the state of the American family. The shift from treating individual patients to whole families entailed new attention to observable 

interactions among family members, as opposed to the psychoanalytic examination of internalized, psychodynamic conflicts. An 

early hallmark of family therapy was the use of one-way mirrors, based on the logic that visual observation was better than the standard 

practice of retrospectively narrating what happened in therapy sessions. The one-way mirror enabled therapists to structure a situation 

in which people on one side of the viewing apparatus could observe those on the other side of the apparatus, without being seen 

in return. From behind a mirror, students learned from watching their teacher interact with a family, and teachers supervised how their 

students conducted therapy. Some therapists even incorporated a one-way mirror into their therapeutic interventions by working with 

a portion of a family in front of a mirror while other family members observed from behind the mirror. This paper will use the history 

of the one-way mirror as a visual technology as a means of raising questions about the epistemology of observation, practices of 

spectatorship, and the production of objectivity in the history of therapeutics. 

Sheila Faith Weiss, Clarkson University (sheilafw@clarkson.edu) 


The Political Function of Human Genetics at International Conferences Under the Swastika

German human geneticists’ most valuable service to the Third Reich was to confer legitimacy to the entirity of the Nazi racial project— 

to publically bestow their professional blessing on the ideal of the “racial state.” An important—if not the most important—battle for 

Nazi racial policy credibility would be fought on the world stage. The proposed paper will focus on the professional activities of human 

geneticists affliated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWIA) during the Third Reich. 

One of the most important ways in which KWIA scientitsts legitimized Nazi racial policy abroad as well as underscored their own political 

usefulness at home was by doing what comes naturally to scientists: hosting, and participating in, international conferences in their 

field. As in other areas of “service to the state,” KWIA researchers took up the call to arms in the international arena with their tried 

and true weapon—with the “well sharpened and well-guided” sword of their science. The mutually beneficial arrangement between the 

Nazi state and KWIA scientists on the international stage is but one example of the ways in which human heredity and politcs serves 

as resources for each other under the swastika. 

Stephen P. Weldon, University of Oklahoma (spweldon@ou.edu) 


Humanistic Psychology and Liberal Religion in America, 1950-1980 

After decades of opposition to and disregard of psychology, religious communities in America in the post-World War II decades rapidly 

began to incorporate ideas from psychology into their work. This accommodation to modern psychology is most apparent in the 

growing interaction between pastoral work and psychological counseling. New ideas and theoretical concerns in the field itself made 

psychology more appealing to religionists. In particular, a group of self-proclaimed humanistic psychologists (Carl Rogers, Gordon 

Allport, and Abraham Maslow, among them) began to challenge some of the philosophical foundations of the two reigning paradigms; 

they attacked the positivistic and deterministic elements in both classical Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism. In so doing, they 

made accommodation to religious ideas easier and paved the way for increased interaction. This paper explores the ways that disciplinary 

concerns facilitated religious agendas. 

Simon Werrett, University of Washington, Seattle (werrett@u.washington.edu) 


Russian Science Illuminated: Physics, Fireworks, and Court Spectacle at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. 

Common disciplinary boundaries ensure the history of the arts and history of the sciences in eighteenth-century Russia often remain 

distinct, despite the fact that for much of the first half of the century, the majority of Russia’s artistic and scientific activity occurred in 

the same place, the foreign-dominated St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Arts. This paper re-integrates the arts and sciences in 

eighteenth-century Russia to reveal how arts served a crucial legitimating role in the early Academy. While Russians exhibited hostility 

or apathy to recently imported and so unfamiliar western physical sciences, they appreciated courtly arts and spectacle as a celebration 

of their own prestige. During the reign of Empress Anna Ivanovna in the 1730s, academicians turned increasingly to arts such as portraiture, 

jewelry, architecture, and printing as a new medium for promoting the Academy and the sciences to such audiences. This paper 

focuses on one such activity, academicians’ designs of allegorical fireworks and illuminations for the court. Shifting the crucial years of 

the early Academy into the thirties, I propose that arts such as fireworks were essential to the successful establishment of science in 

Russia. I also use the career of the arts to re-read controversies over physics and cosmology during the academy’s first decades. Russia’s 

famous ‘Newtonian-Wolffian’ confrontations over subjects like gravitation and vis viva may be seen to wax and wane in tandem with 

developments in the arts, and cannot be fully understood outside of these developments. 

Catherine Lee Westfall, Argonne National Laboratory (cwestfall@anl.gov) 


When Little Plays Big: Fifty Years of Mössbauer Spectroscopy at Argonne 

Using illegally obtained radioactive materials, a turntable employing teeth wheels from Heidelberg’s mechanical toy shops, and other minimal 

equipment available in post World War II Germany, in 1959 Rudolf Mössbauer announced that an atomic nucleus in a crystal does 

not recoil when it emits a low energy gamma ray and provides the entire energy to the gamma ray. This result would lead to a Nobel 

Prize for Mössbauer in 1961 and a highly productive line of inquiry in fields as diverse as physics, biology, and geology that continues 

today. Mössbauer spectroscopy is distinct from work most often investigated by historians of recent science because for decades – well 

into the era of so called “Big Science” it was cutting edge science that used small, inexpensive equipment. Since 1980 it has been used 

by condensed matter physicists at some of the world’s largest accelerators including Argonne National Laboratory’s Advance Photon 

Source. However, this work is significantly different from the accelerator based nuclear and high energy projects that are better known 

to historians. Using the extensive literature on collaboration in large-scale research as a starting point, this paper will explore fifty years

of Mössbauer spectroscopy at Argonne in search for answers to the following questions: What are the incentives for collaboration when 

there is no need to fund expensive apparatus? How does international multidisciplinary collaboration play out over time when it is not 

driven by financial considerations? What role do the “Homes of Big Science” (the U.S. national labs) play in the development of smallscale 

research? And finally, should accelerator-based Mössbauer research be thought of as “Big Science”? 

Peter J. Westwick, Caltech (westwick@hss.caltech.edu) 


Remobilizing for Defense in the 1980s: The Case of the Jet Propulsion Lab 

In the late 1970s the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), a NASA center run by Caltech, perceived eroding support for its main mission in planetary 

exploration. In response, JPL pursued new sponsors in the military. The military buildup at the time included a strong space component, 

and JPL specialized in survivable spacecraft, remote sensing, data telemetry, and image processing all subjects of interest to 

national security programs. JPL managers could thus satisfy a national priority, and at the same time serve their own institutional interests 

by supporting key staff with defense funding. They thus reversed the usual scientists-on-tap argument for government-funded labs, 

namely that scientific research would keep technical people available for defense programs; instead JPL undertook defense work to keep 

technical staff on tap for future diversion to scientific programs. The resumption of defense work, however, came in a very different 

climate from the mobilization of scientists and engineers in the early Cold War, including JPL’s own work under the Army before 1958, 

and it would have to overcome anti-military sentiment, at the lab and on the Caltech campus, spawned by the Vietnam War and the Cold 

War arms race. After intense debate over the morality of military research and the effects of classification, Caltech approved defense 

work at JPL. Subsequent debates over JPL’s work for the Strategic Defense Initiative likewise ended in approval. Despite changing 

social contexts, practical accommodation continued to overcome principled protests, and scientists and engineers proved willing once 

again to mobilize for the military. 

Paul White, University of Cambridge (psw24@cam.ac.uk) 


Darwin’s Correspondence and the Imperial Archive 

If Darwin has been regarded as a collector this has usually been with respect to his beloved beetles or Galapagos finches. Yet in the 

years leading up to the publication of Descent of Man (1871), Darwin gathered materials on human form and expression from correpondents 

throughout the British dominions, the Americas, and the Far East. This paper will explore the role of his correspondence as 

a medium of collection and as a means of transforming local peoples into exhibits of human evolution. 

Greg Whitesides, University of California, Santa Barbara (jgw@umail.ucsb.edu) 


Manufacturing Faith: The Industry at the Intersection of American Science and Spirituality 

Since the 1970s, developments in genetics, neuroscience, alternative medicine, and ecology have engaged scientific, religious, and environmental 

communities in dialogue over issues of science policy and practice. By the 1990s, commentators spoke of a new religion and 

science “dialogue,” but the movement was more than just dialogue. Institutions were created, educational programs established, and scientific 

research funded and undertaken. In short, an “industry,” spanning numerous fields, was built. Today, this industry is part of 

American culture and essential to those groups looking to participate in science policy debates, disseminate their interpretation of science 

to the public, and inform the practice of American science and medicine. This paper provides a model of this industry by dividing 

the participants and organizations into five basic “affiliations:” 1) Scientific Outreach (e.g. the National Institutes of Health Ethics, 

Legal and Social Implications program or the American Association for the Advancement of Science Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and 

Religion); 2) Religious Outreach (e.g. the Presbyterian Assembly for Science, Technology and the Christian Faith or the Catholic 

Committee on Science and Human Values); 3) Science and Religion “Professionals” (e.g. the Center for Theology and the Natural 

Sciences or the John Templeton Foundation); 4) Scientific Esotericism (e.g. SETI, Health & Spirituality, Institute on Noetic Sciences); 

5) Religious Esotericism (e.g. Discovery Institute and Institute for Creation Research or Transhumanism and Ecofeminism). The industry 

has three main activities. First, a few participants conduct research in parapsychology, spirituality and health, immortality, extraterrestrial 

life, and genetic enhancement. Others attempt to influence science policy, particularly genetic science policy, through bioethics. 

Finally, the industry helps shape American spirituality by providing competing interpretations of contemporary sciences. Combining 

these various perspectives reveals a unique glimpse into an industry critical to the assimilation of science in American culture and the 

manufacture of American science and spirituality. 

Chen-Pang Yeang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (cpyeang@mit.edu) 


Toward a Science of Noise 

This paper examines how noise evolved from an annoying matter of fact in engineers’ experience into a scientific concept. Radio engineers 

had been troubled by “tube noise,” disturbances at the output of vacuum-tube circuits, and had attributed its cause to tubes’ 

defects. After the mid-1910s, however, physicists began to understand noise in terms of fundamental physical laws. In 1918, Walter

Schottky at Siemens & Hauske in Berlin argued that the discrete nature of electrons results in disruptive fluctuations”shot noise”at tube 

current. In 1925, John B. Johnson and Harry Nyquist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories also suggested that the current passing a resistor 

exhibits fluctuations “thermal noise”-due to electrons’ random thermal motions, and tube noise is largely thermal noise of tube’s 

input resistance. Based on statistical-mechanical reasoning, the shot-noise and the thermal-noise theories predicted relationships 

between noise intensity and fundamental constants such as electron’s charge or Boltzmann’s constant, which became the objects of 

experimental verification. General Electric researchers Albert Hull and N. W. Williams’s determination of charge of electron from measuring 

shot noise and Johnson’s determination of Boltzmann’s constant from measuring thermal noise offered major empirical evidence 

for noise’s physical theories. By the 1930s, radio engineers used such theories to reduce and to characterize vacuum tubes’ noise levels, 

and to predict the ultimate limit of electronic devices’ performances. The statistical treatments of noise in these endeavors would lead 

to Claude Shannon’s information theory in the 1940s that revolutionized modern communication technology. The history of noise 

therefore sheds light on how modern science and engineering extract useful information from uncertainties and disturbances while controlling 

their detrimental effects. 

Charles N Yood, Lyman Briggs School of Science, Michigan State University (cny1@psu.edu) 


Building Big Iron: Applied Mathematics, “Hybrid Areas” 

and the Social Organization of Computational Science at Argonne National Laboratory, 1949-1970 

From 1949-1970, the work and organization of Argonne’s Applied Mathematics Division contributed significantly to the emergence of 

“computational science” in the late 1980s as a distinct methodological approach to the investigation of physical and biological phenomena 

(alongside theory and experiment). While the advancement of digital computer technology is a significant part of this story, possibly 

more important was the AMD’s efforts to integrate computers and their attendant personnel into the scientific process. Early on, 

the directors of the AMD envisioned a new role for applied mathematicians vis-à-vis scientists and engineers in the development of 

mathematical models suitable for digital computers. In particular, the pursuit of “computational science” required that applied mathematicians 

be incorporated more directly in all stages of science and engineering practices from problem formulation to the definition 

of what constituted a solution. Arguments in favor of such a collaborative structure drew on Cold War rhetoric, debates within the 

mathematical profession, and issues surrounding the increasing quantification of the sciences. While computers (and the need for 

sophisticated, yet efficient mathematical models) allowed applied mathematicians to contend for such a position, it was also necessary 

for applied mathematicians to stake out a new research agenda that balanced their service requirement to scientists and engineers with 

the necessity to conduct research in the foundations of mathematics. 

Chris Young, Alverno College (chris.young@alverno.edu) 


Status and Agenda in Wildlife Preservation: William T. Hornaday as Zoologist and Activist 

William T. Hornaday led wildlife conservation efforts in the late 19th century. His training in zoology provided a basis for setting national 

agendas at a time when conservation was only an emerging concern. Being in the mainstream of biological science a the turn of the 

century and particularly having interests in conservation of wildlife, Hornaday also demonstrated consistent support for eugenic notions 

of human groups and the importance of preserving favored groups over others. The consistency of this agenda raises challenging questions 

about broader connections between conservation of wildlife and eugenics, which historians of science have only begun to explore. 

In this paper, I am especially interested in how Hornaday’s status as a leader in conservation provided greater status to his eugenic views, 

whether the reverse association was more significant, or whether the connection can even be demonstrated as significant to either 

approach. Finally, I am exploring what legacy of eugenics, if any, carries forward in conservation efforts to the middle of the twentieth 

century, by which time Aldo Leopold ranked as a leading voice. 

Jeris Stueland Yruma, Princeton University (stueland@princeton.edu) 


How Experiments are Remembered: Discovery, Discipline, and the Birth of Fission 

The story of fission begins with facts: in December of 1938, in Berlin, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann demonstrated chemically that 

some of the uranium atoms they had bombarded with neutrons had split into various elements, including barium. Hahn and 

Strassmann’s colleague, Lise Meitnerin Sweden having recently fled Nazi Germany and her nephew Otto Frisch then offered a physical 

explanation for the process and Frisch christened it “nuclear fission.” From here, though, the story is contested. Otto Hahn alone was 

awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery. He would later argue that until her flight, Lise Meitner’s physical mindset had prevented him 

from realizing that fission was taking place in their experiments. Historians in turn have argued the presentation of fission as a chemical 

discovery facilitated physicist Meitner’s being written out of the story. An examination of newspaper and journal articles on fission, 

however, suggests that the presentation of fission as a chemical discovery necessitates the presentation of its physical explanation as 

well. When Hahn is called a “chemist,” Meitner as physicist is mentioned. When Hahn is termed a “scientist,” he, or he and Strassmann 

alone are discussed.

David E. Zitarelli, Temple University (zit@temple.edu) 


The Moore-Kline Correspondence: A Portrait of Two Mathematicians 

R. L. Moore (1882-1974) was one of the towering figures in American mathematics during the first half of the twentieth century. 

During forty-nine years of teaching at the University of Texas he developed what has come to be called “the Moore Method,” one of 

the most successful ways to train students to become creative research mathematicians. His first doctoral student, J. R. Kline (1892- 

1955), developed into a leading mathematician at Pennsylvania. This talk will describe the picture of these two influential mathematicians 

that emerges from their voluminous correspondence stored at the Center for American History and the University of 

Pennsylvania. Connections with other leading mathematicians in the R. L. Moore School in Austin (1920-1955) will also be highlighted, 

including some of the first international contacts for Americans with their German and Polish counterparts in the 1920s. 

Benjamin Zulueta, California State University, Channel Islands (benzulueta@yahoo.com) 


People of Science: American-Educated Chinese and the “Cold War of the Classrooms” 

As students of Chinese immigration history have long known, post-World War II American needs for scientific and technological manpower 

opened the door to the immigration of thousands of highly-educated Chinese during the 1950s. Known to historians as the 

“stranded students,” many had come to the US for advanced studies in the natural sciences, engineering, or medicine, intending to return 

to China to contribute to the development of their homeland. The onset of the Cold War and the establishment of the People’s 

Republic of China in 1949 produced fundamental changes in their plans. Indeed, their concentration in fields of broad national security 

import provided the rationale for official American efforts to encourage them to stay in the US, formally adjust their statuses, and 

become permanent residents of the United States. The experiences of the stranded students represent only one component of Chinese 

intellectual immigration during the early Cold War, however. Another cohort of highly-educated Chinese immigrated to the United 

States during the 1950s, but as actual migrants rather than as status adjusters. They immigrated through the good offices of Aid Refugee 

Chinese Intellectuals, Inc. (ARCI), a private American refugee relief organization established in 1952 by Americans concerned about 

reports of a developing refugee crisis in Hong Kong, and especially about the plight of the highly-educated among the refugees. ARCI 

was not simply a refugee relief organization; its program articulated a broad vision of safeguarding US national security that combined 

concerns about the individual potentials of science, migration, and race to affect the outcome of the superpower struggle. Imbuing the 

“minds” in the oft-cited struggle for “hearts and minds” in the developing world with an added valence, contemporaneous observers 

labeled this combined Cold War front the “Battle for Brainpower,” or the “Cold War of the Classrooms.” In this paper, I describe the 

evolution of the idea of the “Cold War of the Classrooms,” and locate ARCI’s formation, rhetoric, and activities within it.

Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

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