2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
of World War Two, set out to demonstrate that it too still had the scientific, technical,
and human capacity to be taken seriously on the world stage. To succeed, I shall
argue, Britain chose a novel and explicitly post-imperial mode, constructed around
the British Commonwealth, to mount complicated, meticulously planned,
multinational expeditions to Everest and the Antarctic. In the attempt on Everest,
the expedition leader, former army officer John Hunt, considered climbers from
Britain, Kenya, Canada, New Zealand, India, and Nepal, while explicitly rejecting
those from Europe or the United States. In London, he chose an experienced New
Zealand climber, Edmund Hillary, and when in Nepal, he chose the locally eminent
Sherpa Tenzing Norgay to join the party. The expedition, after much effort, placed
three pairs of men at the South Col of the mountain after the first pair failed in
their final assault, Hunt ordered Hillary and Tenzing to try. Upon their successful
final ascent, these two members of the British Commonwealth stood at the top of
a supply pyramid that had been constructed in London and flung across Asia.
Neither Hillary nor Hunt had expected the worldwide adulation that was to follow
both constantly emphasized the importance of the entire team. None the less,
Hillary used his fame and the geographical proximity of his nation to the South
Pole to take a more central role in the trans-Antarctic expedition of 1957 and 1958
which was organized by the British geologist Vivian Fuchs as one of the British
Commonwealth’s contributions to the International Geophysical Year (IGY).
Careful planning, appropriate mechanization, and contributions of funds, personnel,
and expertise from Australia, South Africa and New Zealand led to a successful
crossing of the continent. Compared to the Soviet or US explorations of space, the
Everest and Antarctic expeditions were on a very much smaller scale. Forced by
reduced circumstances to operate more modestly, they still managed to complete
their missions successfully and to generate worldwide acclaim. Britain, by operating
in a new post-imperial mode that relied upon cooperation between like-minded
nations, was able to demonstrate that it too had the right stuff in some very cold
and hostile places.
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Susan␣ B. Spath Independent Scholar
A New Cell Theory in 1962: The Procaryote/Eucaryote Distinction
The cell theory introduced in the middle of the 19th century provided a
fundamental conceptual lens for perceiving and studying living things. This
paper argues that procaryote/eucaryote distinction introduced by
microbiologists R. Y. Stanier and C. B. van Niel in 1962 represents a
reformation of the cell theory made necessary and possible by and for the new
biologies of the post World War II era. Disciplinary politics, new knowledge
about the biology of bacteria, and new laboratory practices interacted in
encouraging this reformulation. Stanier and van Niel introduced these
categories to solve a conceptual problem central to their ambitions to make
microbiology into a coherent and rigorous science. From the 1940’s on, they