2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

to a scientific instrument such as Newton’s prisms or Boyle’s air pump. The
story of Wislicenus, Fittig and Michael, in which the authority of no instrument
in a conventional sense was at stake, suggests a reconsideration of the nature
of instruments in chemistry, and the limitations on the historiographical
assumptions behind the concept of making instruments “transparent.”
Nicolas Rasmussen
Steroids at War:
Biomedical Researchers, the Pharmaceutical Industry,
and the Hormones of the Adrenal Cortex, 1940-1946
HSS Abstracts
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It is widely considered that the Second World War marks a discontinuity for
both physical and life sciences, in that large numbers of basic researchers
were brought together in well-funded government research projects for the
accomplishment of practical military goals, initiating a transition to the postwar
era of ‘big science’. This paper discusses wartime research on the cortical
hormones, one of the largest of both the OSRD Committee on Medical Research
and Committee on Chemistry, which despite failure to meet its wartime goals
led to the postwar introduction of the archetypal miracle-drug cortisone.
Analysis of the sharing of information and division of labor both within the
basic life science research community, and between biomedical research
institutions and commercial contractors, points instead to a continuity of the
manner of life scientist-industrialist relations throughout the war period. This
finding suggests that the degree to which many areas of life science in the
interwar period were already organized on a large scale and oriented toward
industrial application has been generally underestimated.
Benjamin␣ W. Redekop Kettering University
Thomas Reid and the Problem of Induction:
From Common Experience to Common Sense
In this paper I argue that in responding to the “problem of induction” as
advanced by David Hume, the influential eighteenth-century Scottish
philosopher Thomas Reid reformulated Aristotelian foundationalism in
distinctly modern terms. An educator and mathematician self-consciously
working within the framework of the new science, Reid articulated a
philosophical foundation for natural knowledge anchored in the human
constitution and in processes of adjudication in an emerging modern public
sphere of enlightened discourse. In the process Reid transformed one of the
traditional foundations of Aristotelian science—common experience—into a
philosophically and socially justified notion of “common sense.” The new
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