2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
importance in Wilhelmian Germany: the “invading alien” threatening the health
of resident populations, and the “destructive machine” of industrialization
associated with “America.” Whereas the grapevine louse lives invisibly
underground and—when unearthed and placed under the microscope—was
perceived as ugly, the Colorado beetle resembles the popular “native” ladybug
in its looks: roundish and “cute,” easily visible, and brightly colored, it could
have figured in contemporary children’s story books displaying images of
anthropomorphized, friendly insects. However, warnings about the beetle had
been published since 1872; the first specimen were spotted and eradicated in
1877. The ensuing campaign against the Colorado beetle marks several transitions
in the ways insects were perceived around 1900: from cute children’s friends to
dangerous foreigners, from companions in everyday life to destructive pests,
and from insect collectors’ items to the inaugural objects of emerging economic
entomology. The campaign involved such various practices as the production
and distribution of hundreds of thousands of candy models of the beetle for
educational purposes, the distribution of ‘wanted posters’ in harbors, and the
development of material practices such as the application of poisonous
compounds to plants and soils. The paper will examine the roles that popular
and scientific representations of the Colorado beetle, as well as material
techniques directed against it, played in shaping the beetle as a scientifictechnological
object. Particularly, it will examine how cultural positions, social,
economic and scientific practices intersected in the process of its emergence.
H
S
S
Adrian␣ D. Johns California Institute of Technology
What We Can Learn From the History of Piracy
Piracy is big news today. Politically, commercially, and socially, it seems set to
play an important part in the definition of the global knowledge economy. As
digital technologies and the World Wide Web transform the worlds of creativity
and intellectual property, so allegations of the offence attain all the more
importance. It is therefore not surprising that we tend to think of piracy as only
the most dramatic symptom of a “communications revolution” that is radically
new. Yet while its current face may be novel, the phenomenon of piracy itself is
anything but. In fact, the identification of certain practices as “piratical” dates
back hundreds of years, to the invention of the printing press, and it persisted
through the emergence of modern forms of science and social order. Piracy and
propriety have been in dynamic interaction since the beginning. The very idea
of reliable large-scale communication of knowledge in print depended on how
that interaction was managed. For that reason, science repeatedly found itself at
the very focus of debates over piracy. In the seventeenth century, fear of piracy
was an important stimulus to the articulation of common conventions of learned
conduct, at places like the Royal Society of London. In the eighteenth, pirates
moved to cities like Dublin, Edinburgh, and Neuchatel, and fuelled the
105