2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
sought to define bacteria as biological entities and to specify their place in the
natural order. By 1961, defining bacteria in biological terms had acquired a
new urgency. A widening group of researchers were using bacteria to investigate
fundamental biological problems, including protein synthesis, the replication
of DNA, and the nature of the genetic code. For practitioners interested
primarily in molecules, legitimizing bacteria as biological organisms
legitimized their tool of investigation. In 1962, Stanier and van Niel proposed
the terms procaryote and eucaryote to refer to two fundamentally distinct cell
types, based on the details of their plan of organization. Conceiving of bacteria
as procaryotes gave these once marginalized organisms a clear and important
position in the order of nature. The procaryote/eucaryote distinction ended the
conventional belief that plants and animals represented the fundamental
bifurcation among living things. The new term also signified the dual nature
of the bacterium as organism and as technology. From the 1960’s through the
1980’s, the procaryote/eucaryote distinction served as the generally accepted
version of the cell theory.
H
S
S
Matthew Stanley Harvard University
Science and the Spiritual Quest:
Religion, Epistemology, and Eddington’s Stellar Models
Arthur Eddington, the British astronomer best known for his stellar models and
the 1919 eclipse expedition to confirm general relativity, developed a philosophy
of science closely related to his Quaker faith. This faith stressed the rejection of
a need for dogmatic certainty in favor of a spirit of continual seeking for spiritual
truth. His religious beliefs provided conceptual resources for constructing a view
of science as an open-ended enterprise in which theories were not valued for
their certainty or finality, but rather by their ability to allow further scientific
investigation. This paper argues that this philosophy was fundamental for the
creation and use of Eddington’s models of stellar structure.
John Stenhouse University of Otago
Protestant Missionaries and Modern Western Science 1790-1930
Historians of science have only recently begun investigating the relationship
between the modern Protestant missionary movement and modern Western
science. This paper argues that missionaries played a modest role in the
production of modern Western scientific knowledge, particularly in natural
history, ethnography, and the biomedical sciences, and a more significant one
in helping disseminate Western science to the world, particularly during the
heyday of missionary science between about 1870 and 1930. Complexity and
163