2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Hebe Vessuri Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC)
Venezuelan Oil and the Building Up of National Science & Technolog
in the Cold War
The Cold War has been thought as a continuation of the second world war years.
Although the process was first and foremost American, British and Soviet since
these countries immediately fought the cold war, it did not leave other nations
untouched. The second world war marked an important watershed in many fields
of science, not entirely due to federal and military sponsorship, but when science
became increasingly integrated into its economic and political environment. The
war led to profound transformations in what it meant to be a scientist, as became
increasingly clear in the following decades. Trying to add facets to the understanding
of the nature of international science in that period, I propose to analyse the
interactions, constraints and opportunities that opened up to scientific practice in
the national context of a developing country which, by reason of its strategic natural
endowment, acquired some diplomatic significance for the Western powers: oilproducing
Venezuela. I will consider the discontinuities within the process of
emergence of a scientific community, putting the lens upon the novelties brought
about by the new international post-war scenario. Among the questions I will
tackle are: What was the new role of the military in Venezuela since 1948 and the
fractures among the intellectual, business and industrial elites that emerged during
the 1950s? In what ways was international science perceived by Venezuelan
scientists as a tool in promoting modernization? To what extent and in what manner
foreign diplomacy influenced the direction of the main research and training
programs in the country, in conditions in which Venezuela had the ability to selffinance
them from its oil wealth? What Venezuelan groups of scientists were more
internationally inclined or became involved in activities of international science?
What factors stimulated them to involve themselves in those activities? Were there
some disciplines more actively engaged than others in internationalization? Which
ones? Were there sociocultural or socioeconomic features allowing to differentiate
the participants in these research activities or in the promotion of international
science? What was the relationship between public science, private technology
and economic and political power as far as petroleum was concerned?
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Anne␣ C. Vila University of Wisconsin, Madison
Sex, Procreation, and the Scholarly Life from Tissot to Balzac
Although 18th-century France is generally considered a golden age for the
intelligentsia, it was also a time when scholars were frequently depicted as freaks
of nature, social misfits, and/or hypochondriacal invalids. The perceived conflict
between thinking and the body often focused on women scholars, particularly
after physicians like P. Roussel began to insist in the 1770s that the female