2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
and 1940s. This paper analyzes the choices Keliher and her colleagues made
in selecting films and film clips for educational purposes, and the issues
educators identified in the study guides. More than that, it seeks to expand
current understanding of science popularization in the first part of the twentieth
century by examining the reception of popular films featuring heroic scientists,
both fictional and historical. By historicizing the pedagogical utility of such
films as Pasteur, this paper suggests ways to enrich contemporary teaching in
the history of science using popular films depicting scientists and the process
of scientific discovery.
Wolfgang Lefèvre Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Drawings in Ancient Treatises on Mechanics
Up to and including the time when our modern critical editions of the ancient
treatises on mechanics appeared, around 1900, scholars did not treat the
drawings in these treatises with the same historical spirit as the text. Even in
cases where such drawings were undoubtedly derivates of the original ancient
figures, they were regarded as being awkward and evidence of a poor level of
drawing techniques. This paper tries to show, on the contrary, that we can still
recognize in these derivates features of highly elaborate drawing techniques
used by the ancients. The thesis of the paper is that these features add up to a
particular syntax of drawing that was characteristic of ancient mechanics.
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Timothy Lenoir Stanford University
Accelerating Discovery: Bioinformatics and Interdisciplinarity
From the 1960s through the 1990s leading biologists and program officers of
major funding agencies such as the NIH emphasized the need for biologists to
emulate the models of interdisciplinary research and multi-disciplinary
teamwork in successful physics projects such as the Manhattan Project and
other big science projects. The field of bioinformatics is one of the successful
offspring of these campaigns. Bioinformatics is a new highly interdisciplinary
field deriving from work in biological disciplines such as molecular biology,
genetics, and evolutionary systematics. The concepts and experimental data
of these areas have been radically extended and operationalized through the
infusion of tools from a wide array of areas in computer science and
engineering, such as information theory, statistics and probability, graph theory,
algorithms, artificial intelligence, data bases, machine learning, and robotics.
These tools and technologies more than anything else have shaped biology as
an information science. On the one hand the tools and technologies of
information science have driven an exponential explosion of new data. On the