2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Tanya␣ J. Levin Johns Hopkins University
Winning the Hearts and Minds of Third World Peoples:
US Oceanography during the Cold War
In the late 1950s and 1960s United States oceanographers stated that they could
find resources that would help feed the malnourished inhabitants of developing
nations. In asserting this claim, oceanographers hoped to convince African, Asian,
and Latin American nations that it was in their interest to allow scientists access to
their territorial waters. Moreover, by asserting their ability to increase fisheries’
knowledge oceanographers also sought the support and funding of US politicians
and agencies for their research. Marine scientists’ commitment to aiding developing
nations dovetailed with the US government’s desire to increase political stability
and win allies in unaligned nations. The International Indian Ocean Expedition
(1961-1966) represented an opportunity for oceanographers to put their
humanitarian rhetoric into practice for the benefit of India and East Africa. However,
oceanographers failed to deliver on their promise to find oceanic nutrients. They
concentrated upon fundamental research and neglected applied fisheries’ problems.
Meanwhile, scientists in developing nations, savvy to the increased attention paid
to them, used US oceanographers’ discourse to advance their own interests.
Theresa Levitt Harvard University
Regenerated Art and Engineering Drawing:
The Jacobin Foundations of the Ecole Polytechanique
The revolutionary campaign for worker education reached its high point under the
Terror with plans for the Ecole Centrale des Travaux publiques (soon to be renamed
the Ecole polytechnique). At the heart of this “Education des artistes” was the
push to convey information through the practice of drawing. The republican worker,
claimed founder and Jacobin leader Gaspard Monge, must rely upon the skill of
the hand and not the abstract laws that characterized the Academic drawing of the
Ancien Regime. This paper examines one aspect of this practice of representation,
color theory, through the institutional structure of the Ecole polytechnique and its
intersection with the regenerated art movement of 1793. It claims that the critique
of Newtonian color theory that one finds within the school drew upon claims for
an embodied mode of depicting and a rejection of abstract laws.
Shang-Jen Li Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
Woman and Worm: Gender and Patrick Manson’s Parasitological Research
In his early career in China, Patrick Manson (1844-1922), the so-called ‘father
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