Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

Jolly, James
E-mail Address: jollych@ucs.orst.edu
"Linus Pauling's Influence on the Scientific Debate over Fallout Hazards"
The controversy over possible hazards of fallout from nuclear tests during 1954-1963 involved a
myriad of scientific, political, and moral issues. The central scientific question in the controversy was
whether radioactive fallout is harmful to humans. Soon after the widely publicized exposure of
Marshallese Islanders and Japanese fisherman to radioactive fallout from U. S. bomb tests in the Pacific
in 1954, fallout attracted the interest of scientists in many different fields, including health physics,
genetics, medicine, radiology, chemistry, and biology. Several scientists who became involved in the
debate over fallout hazards became public figures, perhaps no one more so than the Caltech chemist
Linus Pauling. Though he has primarily received attention for his efforts to convince the public of the
significance of fallout hazards, he also involved himself in debate within the scientific community.
Pauling published two scientific papers on fallout hazards in 1958 and 1959. One paper attacked a
widely reported article by an AEC affiliated scientist who concluded somatic dangers from fallout were
insignificant, if they existed at all. Pauling's other publication raised the specter of a new fallout hazard,
carbon-14. My paper, drawing on my dissertation research, examines both how Pauling's articles affected
the scientific debate and whether the articles' influence resulted primarily from the scientific ideas
they contained or from Pauling's public stature. More generally, this paper explores how the course of
scientific debates may be shaped by their public and political aspects.
Jones-Imhotep, Edward
E-mail Address: imhotep@fas.harvard.edu
Imag(e)ining the Laboratory: post-war ionospheric research and the panoramic ionogram
In the late 1940s ionospheric laboratories across the Western Hemisphere, freshly created under the
demands of wartime communications and post-war defence, turned overwhelmingly to one image - the
panoramic ionogram - as a solution to the problems of knowledge production inherent in their work.
This paper explores how the status of these institutions, their very definition as laboratories, was bound
up with the production, manipulation and interpretation of scientific images, particularly the panoramic
ionogram. Unlike the microphysical investigations and engineering sciences it drew from and fed into,
post-war ionospheric research was unable to directly confine, interrogate and discipline its phenomena.
Instead, its work focused almost exclusively on a steady flow of visual records drawn from the remote,
isolated and often underdisciplined field stations of ionospheric research. The ionogram and the machine
that produced it figured as a crucial palliative to social, material and cultural concerns about these sites
of experiment and the people who operated them; the image, its varying social relations at centre and
periphery, and the metrologies that underwrote its production would serve to crucially define the laboratory
against its adjuncts in the field. In order to bring these issues into their sharpest relief, the paper
focuses on the particularly illustrative context of ionospheric research in the northern polar regions. In
doing so, it hopes to strikingly demonstrate how an enterprise standing astride the morphological and
analytic traditions of modern science might tie its understanding of the laboratory to the complex material
and social relations surrounding scientific inscriptions.
Kaiser, David
E-mail Address: dikaiser@mit.edu
The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics
The population of graduate students pursuing Ph.D.s in physics within the United States exploded
just months after the end of World War II, as veterans streamed out of the service and back into the