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

experiences in the New World, and the chart makers desire to separate those experiences from the
interpretations and calculations needed to make use of them. The chart makers tried to increase the
credibility of their network of observers by standardizing the reports and limiting their scope, thus
making the skill of the observer less important and asserting their own control.
Saridakis, Voula
E-mail Address: saridakis@ameritech.net
"Who was Elisabetha Hevelius? 'Domestic' Astronomy in the Early Modern Period"
Who was Elisabetha Hevelius? In a number of current scholarly works, there appears an image of
Elisabetha using a sextant and compiling measurements together with her husband - the famous European
astronomer, Johannes Hevelius of Danzig. But how extensive was her astronomical knowledge?
And what role did she play as a woman astronomer in the seventeenth century? In this paper, I briefly
discuss her life and involvement with her husband's work. Elisabetha broke traditions of the early
modern period by circumventing limitations imposed on her and entering into a healthy professional
collaboration with her husband. More specifically, she served a dual role as both astronomical assistant
and housekeeper. She was accepted by most of her contemporaries in this dual role, despite restrictions
on what she could and could not do in terms of astronomical practice. Nevertheless, she ultimately
played a significant role in promoting her husband's work before and especially after his death.
Sarkar, Sahotra
E-mail Address: sarkar@mail.utexas.edu
The Puzzle Posed by Plasticity: Berrill's Denial of Genes for Development
In 1948 Waddington claimed that that "it has always been clear that, since genes are the determinants
of the characters of an animal, they must also provide a set of terms in which we shall eventually be able
to give a causal account of development which is, at its own level of analysis, complete and comprehensive
(1948, 128)." While the 1950s forced Waddington to reticulate his models of gene action to accommodate
the complexities of phenogenesis (Sarkar 1999), genetics began an unfriendly take-over of
embryology, replacing the problems of morphogenesis with that of cell differentiation (Gilbert 1996).
Yet, returning to Waddington (1948), and contrasting it to Weiss (1940), Berril (1961) produced the last
major embryological work rejecting genetics and, concomitantly, molecularization in embryology. The
first part of this paper argues that Berrill's apparently retrograde position was significantly motivated by
a special appreciation of phenotypic plasticity. The second part speculates that plasticity was central to
Berrill's developmental world-view because of his concentration on development in tunicates. Until
about 1960 model systems such as tunicates were central to developmental biology (a term that Berrill
coined in the early 1950s) because of its morphogenetic orientation. When classical genetics, which had
no place for plasticity, finally succeeded in co-opting developmental biology to its own framework of
cell differentiation through gene regulation (which Waddington endorsed in 1962), tunicates gradually
became marginalized as model systems.
Schickore, Jutta
E-mail Address: jschickore@dibinst.mit.edu
The Historicity of Epistemological Terms: Changing Notions of Error in Microscopy
Recently, historians of science have argued that not only scientific problems and concepts are subject
to fundamental changes but that meta-scientific, epistemological concepts such as explanation, proof,
and objectivity emerge out of specific historical settings, are intimately related to substantive scientific
beliefs, and change over time. In my contribution, I present this view and consider its significance for
philosophy of science. To do so, I focus on a specific case: the changing notions of error in microscopy.